The essence of the answer?

[Craig Karlberg]

I'm glad Pyramid($10K & $20K) used that harsh buzzer in the WC portion instead of that foghorn type buzzer from TPIR.  Boy how harsh that would sound back in the early 70's.  Maybe they wanted to keep the same type of pitch as the clock sound.

[dzinkin]

[quote name=\'Craig Karlberg\' date=\'Jun 9 2004, 05:22 AM\']I'm glad Pyramid($10K & $20K) used that harsh buzzer in the WC portion instead of that foghorn type buzzer from TPIR.  Boy how harsh that would sound back in the early 70's.  [/quote]
Yeah, in the '70s people's ears were MUCH more sensitive.

Maybe they wanted to keep the same type of pitch as the clock sound.

Maybe you haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about.  GEEZ!

[uncamark]

[quote name=\'ChuckNet\' date=\'Jun 8 2004, 05:46 PM\']

Speaking of buzzers, this leads to one of the great "mysteries" of the Pyramid. Why, during the Winners' Circle round, they buzz [instead of cuckoo] for an illegal clue for example, on the 5th category with 10 seconds left, then they hit the same buzzer when time is up and they're on the last category?

They attempted to remedy this during the Davidson era by switching to two short buzzes for an illegal clue...however, it was so brief that the celebs ended up not hearing it most of the time, and you couldn't count on Davidson to say "Next!" the way Clark used to do...it was asking too much of him. :-)[/quote]
Also, by the time we got to Davidson (and the last few years of the Clark era), the illegal clue buzzer was live and sounded a little different than the canned time's-up buzzer, which was the CBS New York buzzer sound familiar from "IGAS" and Dr. Reason A. Goodwin's judgments on "Password."