It’s one of my favorite films, but I never noticed it.
A friend of mine had an old TV which used one of those remotes; his Newfoundland dog could get the TV to change channels by shaking his head, which made his collar jingle at just the right frequency.
Interesting to learn how these remotes worked. I always thought it was from the audible ‘click’ that they made when you pressed the button, but I couldn’t figure out how the TV could tell the clicks apart for the different functions. They all sounded the same to me. Mystery solved.
I remember the clicks being really loud. And the changing of the channel in our TV was a mechanical action where something actually caused the knob to turn. Changing the channel was a stream of Click-Clunk-Click-Clunk sounds. We kids didn’t care about all that racket when we were channel surfing, but our parents got mad and told us to pick one channel and stick with it.
My parents bought a new fancy TV in the 1970’s while was in college, and being radically new technology, the TV installer had to set it up for them. (Back when TV sets were monsters and took several people to move.) I remember watching him do the setup. He asked how loud they wanted the TV to be at its loudest. He then opened a panel, adjusted a volume knob, and then showed them how the remote could change the volume. When you pressed the button, it got louder each press, and then on the fourth press, it went to mute, ready to start again.
They didn’t realize that the idiot had set the “quietest” setting at their normal listening volume, and each press got significantly louder, too loud to be comfortable. They grew frustrated with it, especially when the phone rang and they fought to get it on mute.
I immediately understood the problem, but they didn’t want a kid to play with their expensive TV. I came home from college one weekend, and they were still complaining about it. They left me in the house for an hour one day and I adjusted the volume knob behind the control panel, so the loudest setting was their normal listening volume. When they got home, I don’t think they noticed for a day, then they said that it started working better. After another day, I confessed and explained what I did, and offered to put it back the way the “professional” installer had it. They kept it my way.
By the way, I was studying electrical engineering at college.
Did those make a little “puff” sound when engaged? I seem to remember us having one of those as a kid, but I’m not 100% sure.
Yup.
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Thank you. I find the Ultrasonics more fascinating than our current Infra-red/Ultraviolet technology, but you know me.
The combination of your interest and your user name bring up a question I hadn’t thought of before: could dogs hear these ultrasonic remotes?
Does anyone here know at what frequencies they operated, and whether dogs’ hearing extends to that range?
Any anecdotal info about dogs reacting to old-style remotes?
My grandparents had a tv with a clicker, but in our house, I was the battery-free remote.
I’m going to research a bit longer, but here’s an article on early clickers.
An excerpt:
“The frequencies used in remotes like the Space Command were too high for the human ear to pick up, though they could be discernible to animals such as dogs and cats. (I can remember my older brother and sister chasing my grandparents’ cats around the house with just such a device.) Taylor says that there was an apocryphal story at Zenith that during testing, one female lab assistant flinched every time the device was tested, due to her keen sense of hearing.”
Not really possible. The frequencies are at ~40 kHz, and no human can hear anywhere close to that. High 20s at most, and that’s under absolutely optimal conditions. Cats can definitely hear it, though.
Some versions of the nominally ultrasonic remotes definitely had overlap with human hearing range. As I mentioned in a previous post, I personally could hear some of the control signals from them when I was in my 20s.
This is what our first cable box looked like - 12 buttons x an A/B/C selector switch on the left gave you a whopping 36 channels! The best part, unlike modern remotes you could never lose it when lying on the sofa because it was a) big & b) wired.
The modern remote is always going missing when you’re lying on the sofa; is it on the floor, between your legs, between your side & the back of the sofa, or on the coffee table? I know it’s around because I used it to turn on the TV 15 mins ago but now I can’t see it. Oh the horror of having to sit up to find it! Nope, with the Jerrold box you’d just reach down to find the cord & then follow it to the end/box & * bam * change the channel! Simplicity works sometimes!
Me too. My grandparents had one (they were oddly not as fascinated by jangling keys and chains as my cousins and I were). There was definitely a discernible ”chirp” associated with pushing the buttons. Chirp isn’t really the right word; I’d almost say I felt it in my molars more than I heard it, but I can distinctly remember the sound/sensation many decades later. It wasn’t unpleasant, just distinct.
I should say that they didn’t have any pets to compare notes with.
Were those electronic models? I think the Zenith model would be difficult to lower the frequency on, since the metal bars it used were already fairly large. But electronics could target whatever.
I’m too young to have encountered ultrasonic remotes, but the CRTs themselves were a longstanding source of irritation to me. The 15.7 kHz from the flyback transformer is hard to hear for many adults, but easily heard by the young.
The fun thing for me with that exact remote was discovering that by pressing two buttons at the same time you could change to stations on other ‘levels’.
IIRC ‘7’ and ‘8’ changed the channel to ‘14’, HBO.
Yes, they were electronic ones. The mechanical ones were obviously very audible–the eponymous “click” as well as a bunch of harmonics–but the electronic ones were partially audible to some people. When I was a kid, I could hear most of the signals; in college, I could only hear it about half them. The sound was a constant tone as long as the button was pressed, and it had that inside-your-head quality, like tinnitus, but with a bit of a warble that made it grate on my nerves.
And yes, the whine from flyback transformers was also annoying, but it was such a constant of my childhood that I mostly learned to tune it out, unless I was listening for it to determine if the circuit was getting power. (When I said I grew up in a TV repair shop, I meant it literally–I was there almost all of my waking hours outside of school. Since there were always multiple TVs on, the flyback whine was inescapable.)