Sony BVU-200A
The 3/4-inch editing deck that broadcasters bought by the dozen and ran around the clock.
Overview
The BVU-200A is a U-matic videocassette recorder built for the edit bay rather than the field. When KBTV in Denver expanded its ENG coverage, the station's order included nine BVU-200A editing VCRs, five BVP-330 cameras, three BVE-500A editing consoles, and five BVU-50 portable recorders. The 200A handled post-production while the portables went out to gather the footage.
Cable News Network leaned on it harder still. According to the company's own account of the operation, CNN owned roughly 53 BVU-200A editing recorders, 17 BVE-500A editing consoles, and 28 BVU-110 field recorders. Jim Kitchell, the network's senior vice president of operations and production, described the 200A and 500A pairing as getting "a real workout in the studio," running 24 hours a day, week after week. He noted the decks were trouble-free in that duty. When 200As were occasionally sent out on the road, knocking around in the back of a truck for hundreds of miles, they held up without problems.
Sony built its editing ecosystem around the deck. The BVE-500A Automatic Editing Control Unit could run automatic control-track editing between two BVU-200A recorders. The same console could also bridge a BVU-200A and a BVH-1000 1-inch machine side by side, which the company pitched as two editing systems for the price of one. The 200A was the U-matic half of that pairing.
The 200A also turns up in less glamorous places. One station engineer, writing up a do-it-yourself project for a trade publication, described tapping the deck's remote plug to build a play-and-ready status indicator with a remote START button. The circuit used logic lows from the VTR's play and pause status inputs, plus a TBC status line to tell it which of two decks was routed to a common time base corrector. The rear-panel interfacing was accessible enough that people built their own accessories for it.
A PCM connection gives the deck a second life in the historical record. At a 1979 trade show, Sony demonstrated a professional two-channel PCM processor designed to run in conjunction with an industrial videocassette recorder such as the BVU-200A. It was an early use of a video transport as the carrier for digital audio. HiFi-Stereo (February 1979, p.34) covered the demonstration, framing it as significant to consumers because the same industrial VCR that stations already owned could be pressed into service for digital audio recording. The 200A was never designed as an audio machine, but its transport was steady enough, and its place in professional racks common enough, that it became the reference deck for that experiment.
The record does not give the usual collector's details: no original price, no published frequency response or signal-to-noise figures, no production run dates. The 200A was bought as infrastructure, ordered in lots and written into capital budgets, not reviewed on a dealer's shelf. The surviving documentation is mostly the manufacturer's own promotional material and the trade-press coverage of the stations that ran them.
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