Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 71

Tr'tire f.VyxJey, 5 19-34 Sect on 5 7 i Cassette or reel, each method of taping has its drawbacks i i On Iho radio By Eric Zorn I MM i i -i -1 Larry Lujack: No new album of "Animal Stones" for the holiday season. Ilk VereCr2-2o NOV fl 77 Wer 1 TVJ MATCHING HALF SLIPS Were S12-S15 UO'J Z9 rrl! a EAR RADIO Answer Man: One of the sT i gret technological strides of this century was surely the development of video I. cassette recorders YCRs) that have given us freedom from that tyrant, the clock. We can program them ahead of' time to record our favorite shows and movies, which we then watch at our convenience. The manufacturers have graciously made it possible to "time shift" television programs that are 8 hours and longer on one tape.

But what about radio programs? A number of the very best radio programs available are not on at particularly convenient times. Much of Steve Dahl and Garry Meier MLS-AM 890. p.m. weekdays is broadcast during the work day, for example, and "A Prairie Home Companion" IVYBEZ, FM 91.5, 5-7 p.m. Saturdays) and "The Midnight Special" YVFMT.

FM 98.7, 10:15 p.m.-l:15 a.m. Saturdays come on during the busiest social night of the week. These shows are all too long to fit on a standard audio cassette, the longest of which I've ever seen is one hour per side. Are there solutions? Yes, but none is particularly satisfactory or sophisticated. The most straightforward way to record long radio programs is to use a lO's-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder with tapes that last three hours per side, a radio receiver with output jacks any standard stereo tuneramplifier will probably do and a plug-in, 24 hoar timer like the one you use to turn the lights on and off to scare away burglars.

Hook up the tape deck to the radio receiver. Set the radio station. Get the tape rolling. Then plug the whole shooting match into the timer and set everything to go on when your show begins and to go off when it's over. The major drawback here is that few of us have reel-to-reel tape recorders anymore because they're so awkward compared to cassettes.

And a cassette, unless you have the exotic "auto-reverse" feature, won't even get you as far as the news from Lake Woebegon monologue on "A Prairie Home Companion." Cassettes are short because they are small. Even the hour-per-side cassettes tend to suffer from jamming and breakage, so we can abandon hope right now that anyone will ever put out a six-hour audio cassette. Another solution, from Mark Czerniec, WLS-AM's ace soap opera reporter, is to hook up a VCR to a radio, in order to record programs such as the ones you mentioned, particularly stimulating editions of "Extension 720" WGN 720 AM, 9-11 p.m. weekdays or, for a gag gift, four hours' worth of Dick Biondi's inane interjections tWJMK, FM 104.3, 6-10 a.m.. To use this technique you must not only be among the 15 percent or so of the population who own a VCR, but you must also own a home stereo and nave it somewhere near the VCR.

Done? Almost all VCRs have audio input jacks very much like the input jacks on the Dacks of tape decks, amplifiers and the like. Some are marked "dub'1 or ''audio dub," but let this not confuse you. Using standard stereo connecting cables if you have an audio tape deck, the cables that run SOUTH WEST 9703 S. Western 233-4633 Oakbrook 654-1515 FordCity 581-6880 Woodfield 882-1616 Oriand Court 460-9090 from that to your tuner will suffice, hook up the audio input of your VCR with the audio output of your radio. If you do not have a stereo or hi-fi VCR, as so many of us don't, you will find only one audio input jack on tue VCR and two audio output jacks on your radio set.

In this case, obviously, you can make only one connection, from either the left or right channel on your radio into the VCR. This is perfectly adequate for monophonic AM broadcasts, and is: not terrible for FM stereo broadcasts as well, especially if you can switch your radio into the FM-mono mode. If you can't and you are an audiophile with a monophonic VCR which makes you a pretty feeble audiophile, you can purchase a plug at an electronics shop that will allow you to feed the left and right audio channels of your radio into one channel on your' VCR. Turn on your radio the volume can be off and set it on the station you wish to record. Set the VCR to go on and off when you want it to, just as though you were recording a TV show.

You can either just leave the radio on, which won't use much electricity, or hook it up to one of those burglar-light timers. When the VCR turns on, it will record the video of whatever channel you set it for, but the audio track will be your radio show. At your convenience, you can play the show back through your TV," which will probably give you fairly tinny reproduction along with an unrelated picture. By making the obvious hookups output to input, you can play it back through your stereo system. If you are very clever, which you will be by the time you get through connecting and reconnecting all those wires back there, you can transfer all you want of the radio shows onto audio cassettes for more permanent safekeeping, again by following the sate, simple rules of input and output.

The real drawback to this method is that it makes a great deal of unnecessary use out of your VCR video playback andor recording heads. These heads do need periodic cleaning, and they can eventually wear out, so it seems a shame to use them for no reason. If there is a VCR out there with an "audio only" mode on it, the Radio Answer Man has not heard of it. Dear Radio Answer Man: "Animal Stories" WLS AM and FM, 94.7, 6:45 and 9:45 a.m. leave me breathless.

Will there be another record album available for sale this holiday season? No, there will not. Larry Lujack and Tommy Edwards didn't do Animal Stories together for several months this year due to scheduling problems, which left them with a dearth of material, so they opted out of a new album. AG vSvv I Chet Coppock; Head to head competition for. Jimmy Piersall's sports talk show. Instead, WLS will sell a three-volume set of the old albums and donate the proceeds, as usual, to the Forgotten Children's Fund.

Last year's Volume HI generated $89,000 for the fund, down from $118,000 generated by Volume II. Dear Radio Answer Man: Are ratings for Chet Coppock's hour-long sports talk show on WMAQ AM 670 better than those for Jimmy Piersall's hour-long sports talk show on WIND AM 560? It looks that way, yes, and funny you should ask, because starting Monday the shows will compete head to head at 6 p.m. WMAQ averaged 44,900 listeners during Coppock's time slot this summer aided by some White Sox play by play and WIND averaged 19,600 listeners during Piersall's time slot. Coppock will also deliver the morning sports reports at 6:20, 7:20 and 8:20 a.m., bumping Gerry Kuc to weekend duty. This move clears the way for an early-evening NBC satellite talk show on WMAQ, but the station is still haggling with the network, which wants it to take more programming.

i jj Vj III. A 1 reAq: uuL i i it i i vi i if I i Watch Howard Rollins and an all-star cast in THE HOUSE OF DIES DREAR on Wonderworks MAJOR FUNDING BY THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING Read the MacMilhn Book FRESH SLICED BOILED Ar.i 7 1 )0 Deunt IIm RieM It Unit Ownlitwi Sale IMt oieiiib 10 3 Lb. ON TV installs movies in place of kids' shows By Jon Anderson TV critic TRUGGL1NG TO find a prof-V itable niche in the fast- changing television market, t- ON TV this month plans to dump children's shows, syndicated programs and half of its SportsVi-sion schedule to concentrate on movies for its 80,000 subscribers in the Chicago area. Available over-the-air to viewers who pay $24.95 a month for a decoder box to unscamble its signals, ON TV will drop such low-rating shows as "Elegant Appetite," "Style 84," "Playgirl on the Air" and r'City Lights as well as all morning children's programming and most sports events other than Black Hawks, White Sox and Bulls games and major fights. "We shouldn't be trying to compete with the gobbledygook on cable channels.

What we do Dest is show movies," says ON TV's Chicago general manager Kent Hauver. ON TV will continue to telecast about nine SportsVision events a month, half the number carried four months ago. All but disappearing will be Chicago Sting games and college basketball. Its movie schedule, about 40 features a month plus a dozen saucier "after dark" films, also will be restructured. Instead of the practice of clustering reruns over sever-, al days, ON TV wants to offer a different major movie each night of the month at 7.

ONK TREND likely to increase is added pay-per-view fees for first-run movies. Last week, about 16,500 viewers, a healthy 20 percent of ON TV's subscriber base, paid an extra $4 to watch "Halloween III: The Final Chapter." Eventually, Hauver predicts, Hollywood movie-makers may opt for a pay-per-view format before releasing movies to theaters. "Cable's in trouble. Pay TV's in trouble. That's not news, to anybody in the industry," he notes.

"We're looking for ways to save it. In the next five years, this whole industry is going to change considerably." Chicago's ON TV also is moving to improve customer relations by making its monthly program guide easier to read, distributing questionnaires to solicit subscriber views and revamping billing procedures to make its late-payment notices less ferocious. A subsidiary of financially ailing Oak Industries, a major supplier of cable-system components, Chicago's ON TV is one of the com- i pany's two remaining subscription television services. In the last year Oak has closed STV systems in Dallas-Ft. Worth, Phoenix and Ft.

Lauderdale-Miami; and attempted to sell its Los Angeles service. 10 OFF ON ALL PREPRICED BAKERY POTATO CHIPS SNACKS CORN KING DACOrj Brown University students voted to take suicide pills in the event of nuclear attack. Watch this shocking perspective on Students for Suicide Tablets. It could affect a nation. CbS.