20-10-2019, 03:28 PM
Hello and thanks for adding me. I thought I'd give a little background to how I got here;
I joined the BBC as a maintenance engineer in the 70’s working for World Service at Bush House in London. The studios and continuity suites I maintained were almost exclusively valve (type B) and the wartime emergency control room was even older (type A - 1932?). In the early 80’s I moved to television and into editing (1 inch and some 2 inch VTRs) with a bit of Telecine (Rank Cintel mk3) thrown in. In those days all of the VT editors and operators were trained engineers as you had to understand equipment alignment and first line maintenance.
As HDTV started to kick off I went freelance, installing and maintaining editing and grading suites and dubbing theatres (Avid/ProTools Dolby 5.1 mixing suites).
I decided to retire about a year ago as the broadcast scene was becoming manic with almost unachievable timescales and unrealistic budgets for projects (the final straw was a project for a major broadcaster who’s ‘senior project engineer’ had an MBA but no engineering background).
So here I am, beginning to rediscover some of the things that fired my interest in the first place - I guess my first love will always be analogue radio and HiFi equipment (valve and solid state), I am also interested in vintage test equipment.
If anyone is still awake after reading all that - I only came across this forum recently having subscribed previously to another popular forum - I must say that the whole atmosphere here is much more relaxed and welcoming - on the other forum I always felt nervous of offending anyone (having seen how interesting contributors just ‘disappeared’ if they broke the rules) and therefore rarely posted (perhaps just me . . .)
I joined the BBC as a maintenance engineer in the 70’s working for World Service at Bush House in London. The studios and continuity suites I maintained were almost exclusively valve (type B) and the wartime emergency control room was even older (type A - 1932?). In the early 80’s I moved to television and into editing (1 inch and some 2 inch VTRs) with a bit of Telecine (Rank Cintel mk3) thrown in. In those days all of the VT editors and operators were trained engineers as you had to understand equipment alignment and first line maintenance.
As HDTV started to kick off I went freelance, installing and maintaining editing and grading suites and dubbing theatres (Avid/ProTools Dolby 5.1 mixing suites).
I decided to retire about a year ago as the broadcast scene was becoming manic with almost unachievable timescales and unrealistic budgets for projects (the final straw was a project for a major broadcaster who’s ‘senior project engineer’ had an MBA but no engineering background).
So here I am, beginning to rediscover some of the things that fired my interest in the first place - I guess my first love will always be analogue radio and HiFi equipment (valve and solid state), I am also interested in vintage test equipment.
If anyone is still awake after reading all that - I only came across this forum recently having subscribed previously to another popular forum - I must say that the whole atmosphere here is much more relaxed and welcoming - on the other forum I always felt nervous of offending anyone (having seen how interesting contributors just ‘disappeared’ if they broke the rules) and therefore rarely posted (perhaps just me . . .)
