Gates 52-CS Studioette
A four-channel broadcast console that gave a small station the whole studio in one modest steel box. Per a 1971 classified ad, it was still earning its keep two decades on.
Overview
The pitch was plain: complete studio operation for AM, FM, and TV service, in a cabinet that tilted back so an engineer could get at the tubes. Gates built the 52-CS Studioette as the entry point of a three-console speech-input line. The company's own catalog copy positioned it for "smaller stations" - the ones that needed a working air chain more than a rack full of separate boxes. The advertising framed it as a building block rather than a compromise: Audio (April 1952, p.15) described the console as ideally suited to small stations yet often folded into a larger master-control installation. That is the sort of double duty a modestly priced console either earns or doesn't.
Gates specified four mixing channels, two for microphones and two for turntables. Both phono channels have cue attenuators, so turntables, network feeds, or remote lines could be routed to an external cueing amplifier. Three remote lines were accommodated with full override and cue facilities, so a station could take a network feed or a ballgame without unpatching the room. Four amplifiers live inside: two two-stage preamplifiers, a four-stage high-gain program amplifier, and a three-stage monitoring amplifier rated at 50 Db. of gain. The power supply is self-contained, which in a small-station rack is one less thing to wire and one less thing to fail.
The published numbers are broadcast-grade on paper. Frequency response is plus or minus 1½ Db. from 30 to 15,000 cycles. Distortion across the program circuit, preamplifiers included, stays under 1% from 50 to 15,000 cycles. The monitoring amplifier holds 2% or less at 4 watts output across the same band. Overall program-circuit noise sits 65 Db. below reference. In 1952 those figures were respectable for a console at this price, and Gates pointed to the construction to explain how: input transformers with multiple mumetal shields, all transformers impregnated and moisture-sealed, and shock-mounted tubes in the preamplifiers and the first stage of the high-level amplifier. The front panel carries a large illuminated 4" VU meter, which is the one piece of the console an operator looks at all day.
Servicing was designed in, and the surviving documentation is candid about it. The steel cabinet tilts back for changing tubes, cleaning attenuators, and reaching terminal strips. Pulling the top exposes the under-chassis wiring. Gates' own advertising sold the Studioette on this logic: combine functions through key control to keep the price down, and keep the components the same as the rest of the Gates speech line. Audio (June 1952, p.17) ran the company's pitch that the console was "popular" and "modestly priced," and noted the argument that several Studioettes might serve a TV station better than a single larger console.
What the console is not, at least by the evidence available, is a collector's darling. It confirms the console was still working and still worth money nearly two decades after the ads ran, and it confirms the resale market for Gates speech equipment is thin enough that one classified is the whole paper trail. Buyers today are mostly broadcast-history people and small-station restorers, and the practical questions are the usual ones for 1950s tube gear: transformer condition, attenuator noise, and whether the shock-mounted tubes and sealed transformers survived however many decades of storage. The tilting cabinet helps here — it means the chassis has usually been opened and inspected at some point, for better and worse.
Gates' broader line gives the Studioette its context without flattering it. The SA-50 was the dual-channel flagship with nine mixing channels, dual program amplifiers, dual VU meters, and a 10-watt monitoring amplifier; the SA-40 was the single-channel workhorse Gates called perhaps the most-used speech console in TV and radio. The 52-CS sat below both, and the company was honest about that — it was the console you bought when the budget said one console and the job said complete studio. For a small AM, FM, or early TV operation, that trade was often the right one. For anyone chasing the sound of a 1950s air chain today, it remains a legitimate way in, provided the transformers are sound and the price reflects the fact that parts and documentation are scarce.
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