AM Stereo Sound

[kaysguy]

I put WODX 1480 and WMIB 1660 on in stereo in May of '99. They stayed that way for a couple of years and sounded teriffic. One of the best AM Stereo stations was WOKY in Milwaukee. On an early 2000's Dod Stratus radio they sounded awesome!

Those Chrysler product radios were excellent AM Stereo performers.

I had a 1988 Dodge Lancer with the AM Stereo radio it did sound great...can't say as much for the car, but it was a good radio.  I still have a Sony Walkman with AM Stereo and a Sony SRF-A100 radio with stereo speakers for AM and FM, switchable between Kahn-Hazeltine and Harris/Magnavox/Motorola systems.  Great sounding...when broadcasts were in true stereo.

[Mike Sheridan]

AM Stereo was much like HD radio is today, too little too late.  Just like AM Stereo only a few diehard radio geeks knew what it was all about.  It took a lot of work to get AM Stereo to sound good.  WBT spent a great deal of money redoing their directional array and broad banding their phasing unit.  Kahn didn't have as much separation and Motorola had platform motion on distant signals, both had more noise and not as much frequency response as FM.

It did get receiver makers to increase the bandwidth of their receivers and radio stations started working on providing better audio.  Yes it sounded good but FM still sounded better.  The other good thing was it gave us more program choices as FM became more commercialized.

Just my 2 cents!

[Bongwater]

I found this odd video today.......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emoSe0CvvT8

[Bill DeFelice]

When I engineered the now-defunct WMMM-AM 1260 in Westport, CT they were operating in Kahn AM Stereo and they sounded fantastic. I have very few recorded airchecks in stereo but I heard the station before and after the implementation of the NRSC-1 mask and AM Stereo can sound fabulous!

I had monitored my station using the Kahn AM Monitor adapter, the Sony SRF-A100, a Sony SRF-A1 as well as a Sony CFS-6000 boombox and the station always sounded great. I think if all the bickering didn't take place regarding which system to use that AM would be in a better place today instead of the dreaded clutter of I-Buzz.

I have a couple of stereo airchecks which I have yet to post but over on the WMMM tribute site I have one of testing the Harris MW-1 transmitter in Kahn AM Stereo using the Mama's and Papa's California Dreamin' - this taped aircheck doesn't do justice to just how good that station really sounded!

[magnaflux]

I put WODX 1480 and WMIB 1660 on in stereo in May of '99. They stayed that way for a couple of years and sounded teriffic. One of the best AM Stereo stations was WOKY in Milwaukee. On an early 2000's Dod Stratus radio they sounded awesome!

Those Chrysler product radios were excellent AM Stereo performers.

Yes, I do agree with the Chrysler radios being very "musical" sounding, with a warm low end like a tube set and excellent seperation. I had a 1990 Plymouth Horizon with an AM/FM stereo and cassette unit. One night I tuned into WKBW (1520), the powerhouse out of Buffalo, New York while sitting in my driveway in Bay Shore on Long Island. Clear skywave with hardly any fading. Must have sat there for 2 hours listening to the most sweetest sounding AM I ever heard. I requested a song and the DJ asked where I lived. When I told him how good it sounded, he must have passed it on. Took my phone number and, lo and behold, the station manager called me to verlfy!

Mike S.
Phillipsburg, MO
formerly from Bay Shore, NY

[Lkeller]

Mike Sheridan is right about AM Stereo being "too little too late." I recall a couple of early efforts at stereo. You were supposed to use 2 radios facing each other, tune the first to the left side of the frequency, and the other to the right side of the frequency.  This supposedly gave the listener stereo separation.

But who goes to this kind of trouble, when FM is available?  By the time true AM stereo had come around, I had abandoned music on AM.

[Greg Branch]

You were supposed to use 2 radios facing each other, tune the first to the left side of the frequency, and the other to the right side of the frequency.  This supposedly gave the listener stereo separation.

I can't say that I have ever heard of that before, but it doesn't surprise me. In the 90's there were some FM stations in rural Texas that attempted "multicasting" 2 simultaneous high school football games. They would carry one game on the left channel and another game of the right channel. Sucked if you had a mono radio.

[anotherguy]

I think I remember someone on FM doing that either as a joke or stunting before a format change, with different songs or formats on each channel. Weird. 

[michael hagerty]

Mike Sheridan is right about AM Stereo being "too little too late." I recall a couple of early efforts at stereo. You were supposed to use 2 radios facing each other, tune the first to the left side of the frequency, and the other to the right side of the frequency.  This supposedly gave the listener stereo separation.

But who goes to this kind of trouble, when FM is available?  By the time true AM stereo had come around, I had abandoned music on AM.

XETRA in Tijuana used this approach in 1969 and 1970. But the idea goes further back.

I didn't know this until recently, but Roger Carroll broadcast his nightly show on KABC in Los Angeles in stereo in 1958 and the months of 1959 he was there before going to KMPC. It was a simulcast on KABC-AM (790) and FM (95.5), with one channel going out over the AM, the other over the FM, and Roger's mic on both. Listeners were told to set an AM radio and an FM radio six feet apart and sit six feet back in the center.

An aircheck exists of Roger doing the show in January 1959 from the L.A. High Fidelity Show at the Biltmore Hotel...and it was recorded (most likely at the remote location or the studio) in stereo. It may well be the earliest stereo aircheck in existence, since the FCC didn't type-approve FM Multiplex until 1961.

[KyDXIn]

For those of you in the midwest, WSLM-AM 1220 in Salem, Indiana just began broadcasting in stereo.  They have local programming and are playing MOR format.  They also have a pretty broad coverage area roughly from Louisville to Indianapolis and Evansville to Cincinnati.

http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/pat?call=WSLM&service=AM&status=L&hours=D