In 2018, viral stories spread across the internet that in the UK, they were removing all the analog clocks from classrooms because today’s students could not read them anymore. As it turns out this story was mostly false. According to Snopes - What's True: UK sources suggested that schools there could minimize disruptions during standardized examinations by replacing analog clocks with digital versions in examination halls, because some students had difficulty estimating time remaining from the former. What's False: Schools throughout the UK are not replacing analog clocks with digital versions in all classrooms because modern students cannot tell time.
Left: Analog clock on my studio wall. My personal take on this is that at least for me, doing a radio show with a digital clock is more difficult than doing one with an analog clock. That is why I have a big old analog clock in my home studio.
Probably the biggest reason that I like analog is that I am an old school DJ who announces the time regularly is a part of my banter. My old boss, Woody Windham used to bang at us “TTBB” all the time. “TTBB” stood for Time, Temp – Boom Boom. One of the first to push TTBB was Rick Sklar the legendary program director at WABC in New York City. Rick was so adamant that his DJs “TTBB” that every song in the playlist had two copies on the carts they used, one cart with the iconic chime at the end and one that did not. The operating engineers at WABC alternated playing songs with the chime and songs without. When there was no chime the DJ announced that WABC Temperature was XX Degrees. Woody did not do that at WCOS since we played the songs off the 45 RPM records, but there was a button on the desk of the mixing console that rang a doorbell chime next to a small microphone mounted on the wall of the studio. I’m a little surprised that Milton, our engineer never had to replace that button that was pretty much worn down by all the WCOS chime time announcements.
I admit that digital time is easier to read in the first half of each hour than analog. But in the second half of the hour if we wanted to say 23 minutes before 10 instead of we would have to subtract 37 from 60 to come up with the time. That took work for the already overloaded brain DJ brain to do in an instant.
In school we learned to read analog time so well that a glance at the analog clock in the second half hour told us the number of minutes before the hour almost as quickly as the number of minutes after the hour in the first half hour. We got it directly off the clock with no calculating required.
Most of the studios of old had Western Electric analog clocks with sweep hands for the seconds. These clocks received a pulse over a telephone line that reset the clock at the beginning of each hour. Once we got used to the idiosyncrasies of each clock we pretty much knew how many seconds before or after the top of the hour on that particular clock the reset would occur. The most accurate of those old clocks I worked with was at WUSC-AM which reset at ½ second before each hour, giving me just enough time to turn the “pot” up for the Mutual Radio news on the top of the hour. The worst one was at WIS-TV where we had to fade to black from the station ID slide and punch NBC up on the switcher at 2 ½ seconds before the hour. At least at WIS when switching in a local station break we knew that NBC would be dark for exactly 75 seconds so we could verify the time when we switched out of the network by noting the time that the network started the blackout.
By the way, the local stations had to be careful to start their breaks on time too. Because there was no internet to send messages with, NBC and the other networks would often communicate last minute changes via showing slates containing the messages on the network feed after a moment of “black” during the local breaks. So, if you were the switcher at the local station you also had to remember any message that is being shown while switching in the film, videotape or worse case the slide/audio tape announcements that comprised the local break. Oh, and remember; “Never flop a mirror on the air – use your fader bar!”
Just to tell you that an old dog can learn new tricks. When I started doing my oldie show on WUSC-FM, I walked into a studio that did not have an analog clock. There is a digital clock built into the face of the AudioDesigns D-75 mixing console in the main control room. So immediately I needed to up my digital clock skills since TTBB is so ingrained in me and I felt silly telling everyone that it is 11:48 or whatever the time said at the moment.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the clock in the console was not very accurate. This past week it was nearly three minutes off compared with the time on my computers. Having clocks that don’t agree is at the least confusing to a busy DJ so years ago I developed the habit of placing an old station envelope to hide the inaccurate clock. John, our station engineer came to the rescue by putting up a large digital clock display on the monitor where the Automation Display and the RDS and logging application reside.
I still wanted an analog clock display somewhere in front of me and fortunately my music source SAM Broadcaster has an analog clock window. So I put it up and now I’m all happy and smiles. Well, mostly, that analog clock display is a little hard to read with these older eyes.
One last comment about the analog clock in my home studio; it is a radio controlled clock that is constantly updated by WWV the US official time source out in Ft. Collins Colorado. It is also battery operated and I can always tell when the batteries need changing when I cross check the clock with internet Network Time Protocol (NTP) before each show. I fear that as the frequencies (2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz) that WWV uses become noisier that I will eventually have to switch to a more expensive clock that reads NTP over my local Wi-Fi network.
So tomorrow, I will be TTBB’ing my way through the Backbeat Show on WUSC-FM. If you hear me stumble a bit with the time and it’s the second half hour, you will know that I had to “do the math”. No matter, it keeps me on my toes. Oh MY!
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