Bye-Bye CBS Chirp!!
After 30-plus years serving millions of listeners every day, every hour on hundreds of CBS Radio stations across North America–the “chirp” is gone forever. The chirp was automation tone which stations started using in the 1970’s to operate tape machines for local commercials, newscasts, etc. According to a CBS website, the network even used the chirp to run seperate commercials on their seperate east, central, and west coast feeds of newscasts.
The anchor and producer (who sits next to the anchor during the top of the hour newscast) had buttons in front of them. Those buttons would fire the “chirp”, which would start the next commercial or segment of the broadcast.
In today’s digital world–the audio chirp is no longer needed. The network and local stations like ours use silent “closures” which do the same thing the chirp used to do. But, for longtime listeners, and for the broadcasters ourselves, the chirp was more than an automatic signal–I used it many times as my cue to “shut-up” since the network’s coverage was about to begin. When I would join a newscast in progress on an out of town station, say during a commercial break, that chirp would let me know I had tuned into a CBS station.
The chirp may soon have company in broadcast automation heaven. The old Mutual Network used a tone many refer to as the “bee-doop”, a two tone sequence which did the same job the chirp did for CBS. As of today, the bee-doop still exists–but it is probably facing a near-future extinction. Westwood One is the provider of old Mutual (NBC) shows like Marketwatch, First Light, and America in the Morning–and Westwood One is also the provider of CBS News–and they are all now sent to local radio stations via a new digital receiver system–which uses those “closures” or nearly inaudiable 25/35 khtz tones for long form programming. So, the “bee-doop” is likely to join the “chirp” in radio heaven real soon.
Sure, it was 2/10 of a second of audio, a few times an hour, but it was a part of our broadcast history for many years. In case you are unsure of what I am talking about, here’s a clip of the chrip, and a clip of the bee-doop!
July 15th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
So I am reading this very interesting article in Best Buy trying a new pc. So the chirp is gone. They are now using the low end tone that is barely audible, but you can hear it with good woofers, correct?