The NAB Cartridge (named after the National Association of Broadcasters) was a mainstay of radio broadcasting from the late 1950s-1990s. It was replaced by the mini disc and computerised broadcast automatons.
NAB Cartridges were used primarily for jingles, station identifications, commercials and music. Each cartridge comprised of several recordings of the same, short jingle. Mechanically the tape is designed to play on an endless loop. This required limited manual operation such as rewinding or fast-forwarding, and enabled short recordings to be accessed efficiently and accurately during live broadcasts.
Because they were used in broadcast NAB Cartridges often used the best quality tape available at the time which was usually AMPEX. As readers of the blog will know, this is bad news if you want to listen to the tape a few years down the line. We baked the tapes so they could be played back again, and were then transferred using a SONIFEX HS Cartridge player.
You can listen to one of the incredibly cheesy jingles below!
Once a common sight in Radio stations around the world, the NAB Cartridge machine or Fidelipac was used for short jingles and announcements, sometimes even for longer recordings. Using a similar sized cartridge to a domestic 8 track machine the NAB cartridge was different in that the pinch roller was not in the cartridge but would hinge up in the player and hold the tape against the capstan. Running at 7.5 inches per second (ips) compared to 3.75 ips in domestic cart machines the recording and reproduction quality good be very good but it was the ease of use and cueing ability offered by these machines that made them so useful in broadcasting.
We have Sonifex cart machines that while very well built do have rubber parts that will degrade over time and reduce the transport performance. Luckily we have some of the last remaining stock of new pinch rollers, motors and capstan drive belts.
The pinch roller in one of our machines had become quite hard and the rubber shiney over time. A pinch roller in this state may not hold the tape as securely and could also have flat spots both leading to increased wow and flutter and poor tape handling. These pinch rollers also have high quality cartridge bearings pressed into their shell. Over time these loose their lubrication, wear, become rough feeling and will also add to poor tape handling.
Older, fragile and valuable tape must be handled and used carefully. A ‘chewed’ tape caused by a poorly maintained tape transport in any tape machine, audio or video is a disaster and hard to recover from perfectly.
Both halves of the cart machine case need to be removed to easily change the pinch roller. While the access is good and the machine, in this case a Sonifex microHS, had been designed for easy servicing the pinch roller is still a little fiddly to get to so I removed the transport from the main chassis.
To remove the pinch roller a small slightly hidden C clip must be removed you can see in the image above the slot machined into the roller shaft where it sits and holds the roller. This is hard to remove as the plastic bush on top of the roller stops you getting a small screwdriver in. I managed to remove the C clip with some fine circlip pliers. Be careful not to loose the clip if you don’t have spares, they fly away very easily!
Now the new roller can be placed on the shaft. It’s a good idea once all the transport is out to give everything a good clean with IPA.
On this machine, the castan drive belt was quite slack so a new one was fitted, which is easy now the transport is removed. First though the capstan flywheel and motor pulley were cleaned of all the old rubber belt residue that tends to accumulate over time.
The last thing to do is check the pinch roller pressure. This is important to as to high or too low will increase wow and flutter, increase wear to the bearings and capstan surface and give poor tape handling. Due to the design of these NAB cart machines, the pinch pressure needs to be checked with a special cartridge. The pinch pressure is then adjusted from a screw pot on the top PCB seen outlined below in green.
