HOWTO make a proto-mute-button for your 1954 TV: the SHADDAP!

This 1954 HOWTO from Mechanix Illustrated invites the reader to take apart the family TV set to make a remote-controlled mute button (called a "SHADDAP") (!). Remember, Zenith's first TV remote control was decried by the broadcasters as a tool of piracy, because it made it too easy to switch away from the commercials:

ARE some of those long-winded commercials spoiling your TV pleasure? You can cut them off temporarily, without getting up from your chair, by means of a simple gadget you can assemble and install in twenty minutes. It's nothing more than a push-type fixture switch mounted in a small box and connected by a length of lamp cord to the loudspeaker of the TV set. Or, for that matter, to the speaker of a radio set.

Look for a little transformer mounted di- rectly on the loudspeaker, or very close to it. Two wires run from it to terminals on the speaker frame; these are the voice coil connections. Cut either wire, and to the two ends thus formed solder the ends of the wire leading from the pushbutton box. The latter should be long enough to reach your normal viewing position. There is absolutely no danger of shock, as the speaker is isolated from the high-voltage section of the chassis and the juice across the voice coil proper is only a fraction of a volt.

When the selling spiels become too obnoxious, press the switch, and the room will be flooded with silence. Peace, it's wonderful!

make a "SHADDAP" (May, 1954)

• [Anonymous]

  funny, my great uncle made one of these for my grandparents’ TV — no idea how it worked, but there was a cable from the TV to the couch with a single toggle switch. my grandfolks called it the “Blab-off” which I love…

• [Anonymous]

  “Remember, Zenith’s first TV remote control was decried by the broadcasters as a tool of piracy, because it made it too easy to switch away from the commercials”
  I’d be interested to find an actual source on that, it seems like an interesting tidbit of history.

• [maidhc]

  My dad had one of these installed on our TV in the 1960s. Commercials used to drive him nuts. “Jet age plastic so tough bullets bounce off” and “Don’t you think it needs a little more salt? Mother please! I’d rather do it myself!” would make him apoplectic.

  I don’t remember if he did it himself or had the guy from the TV repair place do it. It’s a simple circuit–one of the speaker leads goes out to the remote and can be switched connected or not. The connection on the back of the TV is a switching phono plug that defaults to short if the remote is not plugged in.

  When we say “remote”, back in those days we had a little box connected to the TV by 20 or 30 feet of electrical cable.

  My dad liked to watch the Jackie Gleason Show, and whenever the commercials came on, it was my job to switch off the sound.

  Small wonder that I graduated to running film projectors in college.

• [SomeGuy]

  My dad had one of these on the family teevee when I was a kid (late 50′s). In my childish naiveté I just assumed that he had invented it but I now know he got it from that cool magazine he used to bring home all the time.

  He also rigged up a switch on the living room TV to route the output from his 1940′s era 78 RPM juke box in the basement so he could listen to music upstairs. He’d go down there on a Sunday morning and set it up to play a couple dozen songs and we’d bop out to Benny Goodman, the Glen Miller Band and the Mills Brothers instead of going to church.

  Good times…..

• [Wordguy]

  My grandfather installed one of these for my grandmother, who loved football but hated the commentators. “They practically tell you how they part their hair,” she would say.

  Grandpa’s version had a pot that would adjust the volume plus a mute button that silenced the audio with a satisfying click. 20 feet of lamp cord ran behind the couch to connect the box to the TV.

• [Atomboy]

  I was at a church youth group conference in the early Sixties and our housing host had one of these. I was amazed and pleased. Imagine how delighted I was when remote controls came of age.

• [Anonymous]

  Those things are killing the home taping industry and should be regulated!

• [empollado]

  “No matter how many experts deny it, our ears still insist that the commercials are louder than the rest of the show,” wrote Chicago Trib columnist Larry Wolters in 1959.

  As audiences have been aware of the issue for decades, so have the broadcast and advertising industries. (As long ago as 1956, a major ad agency pursuing a “soft sell” strategy sought to ensure that its TV commercials were perceptually not louder than the shows.)

  In 1956, after a brief inquiry, the FCC dismissed the loudness issue; but the commission later conducted an extended inquiry and, in 1965, issued a statement urging voluntary measures to control loudness. The commission reissued that statement in 1975, but in 1984 voted against regulation.

  In the UK, the 1964 Television Act stated that audio in advertisements “must not be excessively noisy or strident.” That language was reiterated along with further guidelines by the UK advertising industry’s Committee of Advertising Practice in 2008.

  The “Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation” (CALM) Act passed the US Senate at the end of last month. A similar version passed the House last year. The bill may become law next month. (IINM, that legislation mandates loudness regulation for broadcast and cable, but not for web streaming services such as Hulu which are not included in the “Multichannel Video Programming Distributor [MVPD] category mentioned in the bill.)

  For too many decades, ye olde VU meters and peak meters supposedly ‘proved’ that commercials were not exceedingly loud; but those devices were not adequate to evaluate “compression” and “perceived loudness”. Better perceptual-loudness modeling began to emerge in the ’60s; more recently, standards such as “ITU-R BS.1770″ are increasingly widely implemented.

  In technical recommendations issued last year, the (US) ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) noted that “… the industry has recognized that a new proficiency in loudness measurement, production monitoring,” [and management of loudness and dynamics] “… is critical for meeting the expectations of the content supplier, the broadcaster, the audience, and governing bodies. …”

  In August, after nearly two years of “very active” work by the European Broadcasting Union’s “P/Loud” group, a new series of EBU loudness-management recommendations were published.

  Around the globe, progress continues toward greater consensus and implementation of modern perceptual loudness management standards and practices.

• [awfl]

  Why is there only a “mute” button? Why not a “lower-the-volume by 3/4 button”, say 10-12db? Then the room does not become eerily quiet and you can pick up when your show starts up again?

  • [Donald Petersen]

    Why is there only a “mute” button? Why not a “lower-the-volume by 3/4 button”, say 10-12db? Then the room does not become eerily quiet and you can pick up when your show starts up again?

    Well, it’s Mechanix Illustrated from 1954. Placing a switch to interrupt one of the speaker circuits would be a heck of a lot simpler than just about anything else you could do for the purpose. You’d need a single-pole single-throw switch (preferably not a “momentary” push-button… who wants to spend 18 minutes of every hour holding down a button?), a box to keep it in, a few yards of speaker wire, a screwdriver, and (for you fancy-pants swells outside the trailer park) maybe a soldering iron. A trustworthy 7-year-old could pull this one off.

    I remember the “remote” for my family’s first VCR: a 1981 Sanyo Betacord. The remote was a wired “pause” button, to facilitate cutting out the commercials when you were taping “Dallas.”

    Yeah, a hard-wired pause button. On a forty-pound toploader with big lever-buttons that went ka-chunk, and two rotary tuner dials: UHF and VHF.

    …m’lawn!

• [adamnvillani]

  In college (1991-1996) we had an older TV in our student house with no factory-made remote control, and so one of the students had rigged up a simple switch to create a mute button like this. If there was a freshman in the room, it was always his job to man the mute button… if the audio on commercials persisted for more than a second or two, there’d quickly arise a chorus of “MUTE, FROSH!”