RCA 76-B2 Consolette
A complete FM, AM, and television audio system in a cabinet 39 inches wide - built for the station that couldn't afford to go off the air.
Overview
The 76-B2 Consolette is a broadcast console, not a hi-fi component that wandered into a rack. It is a self-contained speech-input system that RCA designed in 1941. It gave small and medium-market stations what they needed to put two studios, a booth mic, a control-room mic, two turntables, and six remote lines on the air without buying a custom desk. RCA's own literature of the period billed it as "a flexible speech input system for maximum economy." The pitch was aimed at the station that wanted professional facilities without a professional facilities budget.
The package is compact. At 39 by 17 by 10½ inches, it fits in a control room corner, and RCA packed in all the amplifying, control, and monitoring equipment for two studios, an announcement and a control-room microphone, two turntables, and six remote lines. Simultaneous auditioning and broadcasting from any combination of studios, turntables, or remotes was part of the design. The operator could cue one source while another was live. The talk-back system runs independent of the program channel, so cuing a studio doesn't bleed into the feed.
According to the company's own 1946 announcement, the 76-B2 differs from two previous RCA models, already in service in more than 300 stations, primarily in its frequency response, now extended to 15,000 cycles. For a speech-input console of the immediate postwar period, that was the headline upgrade, and RCA treated it as such.
Emergency amplifier and power-supply circuits were part of the design, and RCA's stated purpose for them was blunt: help prevent time off the air. A station that loses its console loses its broadcast, so the 76-B2 was built on the assumption that something would eventually fail and the show had to continue anyway.
The trade press of the day documents the 76-B2 in actual stations. FM magazine's April 1945 issue described the control room shared by FM station WSBF and AM station WSBT. Two RCA 76-B2 Consolettes handled the output of two studios and fed a master control console that switched outgoing lines to the two transmitters. The Consolettes were a working block in the signal chain, one per pair of studios, doing the input work while the master console handled the switching. The same issue noted RCA 44-BX microphones in the studios and RCA 70-C turntables in the foreground, so this was a complete RCA chain.
RCA's own planning documents make the intended market clear. In a 1945 survey of its FM broadcast line, RCA positioned the 76-B2 as "well suited for small and medium-sized FM stations and the individual studio booths of larger stations," with complete facilities for two studios, booth announcements, turntables, and remotes. The 1946 announcement repeated the theme: a complete high-fidelity audio system for FM, AM, and television at a price even the smallest station could afford. This was the entry point to RCA's broadcast line, and it was priced and sized accordingly.
The 76-B2 stayed in service a long time. A 1954 classified ad in Audio listed a 76B2 console for $450 alongside a Presto 6N lathe and an Ampex 403C. By 1982, a studio listing in Mix magazine's January issue still had an RCA 76-B2 in its mixing-console inventory, a 6-in by 2-out board sitting alongside a Speck 800C. That is forty-one years after RCA designed it.
For collectors today, the 76-B2 sits in an odd corner of the market. It is broadcast equipment, not consumer hi-fi, so it doesn't command the prices of a Marantz or a McIntosh. It is also far rarer in surviving numbers, because station gear was worked hard, modified, and scrapped when it failed. The 1954 asking price of $450 gives a sense of its residual value a decade after introduction. What a working example fetches now depends heavily on completeness, since the value of a broadcast console lives in its original transformers, attenuators, and connector complement. Expect to find modified units. The emergency amplifier and power-supply circuits are exactly the subsystems most likely to have been bypassed or rebuilt over the decades. Original documentation is scarce, and the 15,000-cycle response claim is an RCA specification, not an independently measured figure.
What the 76-B2 represents, more than any single spec, is a moment when broadcast audio was modular, serviceable, and built to a standard rather than a price point. It is a console for people who cared whether the station stayed on the air, and that is a surprisingly rare thing to find in a box 39 inches wide.
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