And if that were true in terms of audience behavior, noncomms would be crushing it in the ratings. Instead, what people actually do is turn from the FM station playing a six-minute commercial break to another one they like that is playing music at that moment.
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2024 Format Change Predictions
- Thread starter HenryOchs
- Start date
Pamal is in the Hudson Valley too which is not upstate nor is Albany which is the Capital Region of New York State.
AM can & I mean can sound as Good as FM
It's the FCC that limit the bandwith to 5 kHz of audio
AM Stereo sounds better then FM Stereo
It's the FCC that limit the bandwith to 5 kHz of audio
AM Stereo sounds better then FM Stereo
The path to being a political power broker in San Francisco does not run through any kind of media outlet, the San Francisco Standard website notwithstanding. The Standard is more positioned to be a contrarian to established progressive power structures in the city anyway. The typical path, in San Francisco as well as in some East Bay cities, is through the "iron triangle" (I am borrowing a term from political science here) of public employee unions, advocacy groups, and certain ethnic organizations. Sometimes in San Francisco, but not in Oakland or Berkeley, corporate leaders and real-estate interests can participate as well, or are at least consulted.
KGO has gone the way of the San Francisco Call. Neither is likely to be revived soon.
What's interesting is we're talking about AM radio in the present tense, while the media industry is talking about the end of linear media as we know it. These 24/7 channels that we've known forever are in danger of either becoming extinct, or getting sold to companies that are ill funded to keep them operating. We're seeing it right now with regional sports networks like Balley's going bankrupt because the business model can't pay for the rights fees. We may start to see that in more places, like perhaps CBS. The big money is in big tech: Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and YouTube. None of them do linear TV. Everyone wants to be where the money is, and it's not in conventional or traditional media. So it makes you wonder what the future will look like.
Barely anyone still has an AM stereo receiver and in the US I’m guessing there are only a few stations still transmitting in AM Stereo.
Additionally, if the bandwidth was increased wouldn’t AM lose many stations? You couldn’t have a higher quality AM without many operators forfeiting or receiving buyouts. AMs would suddenly interfere with its neighbors to the degree of potentially jumbling the airwaves.
I think that depends entirely on whose FM stereo. Both operating optimally? FM.
Betamax looked better than VHS. LaserDisc looked better than both of them. All three are dead. Nobody's going back to AM. Even if the FCC opened bandwidth back up, the noise floor has risen dramatically over the past 40 years.
All this energy needs to be devoted to keeping FM alive----there's a big cliff coming with people currently under 30.
The FCC does NOT limit the audio bandwidth of AM to 5kHz. In the US the max audio freq. response of AM is 10 kHz, giving a band width of 20 kHz. This standard was set in the 1980s. Prior to this the max. audio freq. response of AM was actually 15 kHz (same as FM) allowing an occupied band width of 30 kHz. Depending on the equalization and processing of the stations audio, the tuning of the stations' phasers and type of antenna system used stations can sound pretty darn good in wide band receivers. The reason most think AM sucks is because the your typical AM radios' IF band pass is usually less than 5 kHz, if that. So indeed it does suck. All stations across the band sound the same-- BAD!, in such receivers.
By coincidence, I remembered this statement this morning while having breakfast in the hotel where I'm staying, and where one of the TVs was tuned to CBS This Morning. They were promoting cbsdeals.com, selling various products. Visually, it was not all that different from HSN, QVC, etc. It was in partnership with some online retail outfit that I hadn't heard of before - but still, this is CBS we're talking about here. That was the kind of thing that CBS at its peak would have dismissed out of hand. Time to revive TV auctions?
I think the aforementioned energy is coming from a very small and very vocal group of people.
I wonder if we're going to see the kinds of experiments on FM that we saw on AM in the mid-1980s when that decline became painfully obvious. Unfortunately, most of those experiments didn't pan out.
At one time NBC was partners in a similar shopping channel. It may have been called ShopNBC. It's now ShopHQ.
That's a really good point. If the cliff is a demographic one, and it appears it is, the instinct will be to super-serve the audience that still listens, which will then be an older one, with no replacement for the listeners who age out of desirable sales demos.
Eventually, the gas runs out of the tank (analogies from AM being full-service talk/music/news stations replacing old-school ACs, Adult Standards and Classic Country).
If I recall correctly, the NRSC mask and pre-emphasis were adopted around 1988 or 1989..
Way back in the late 1930s, parallel with the development of FM, there was an "experimental" AM service with stations between 1500 and 1600 kHz that were granted 20 kHz channels. There were four of them - New York City, Connecticut, Kansas City, and Bakersfield, California. They lost this status when NARBA came into effect in 1941 and were assigned standard channels. None of that affected the actual frequency response of the stations; it affected the likelihood of interference from adjacent channels. By then, it was clear that FM was going to be the high-fidelity medium because of its much better ability to reject interference. The Kansas City experimental station, W9XBY, which is the one I know the most about, only survived another year.
It's very difficult to get clean reception of an AM signal, especially in urban areas. There's atmospheric interference that's always been. Plus computing devices are far more widespread than they were just 30 years ago. They generate noise. Electrical infrastructure is aging - a cracked insulator on a 13.8 kv line can spread noise over a wide area - with some utilities having neglected maintenance in order to avoid unpopular rate increases or reductions in actual rates of return. To phrase it another way, once an AM signal leaves its transmitting tower, it's subject to additional electrical chaos that affects the quality of the signal. FM is able to resist that chaos to a much greater degree than AM.
As for AM stereo, my experience is that such stations, at least on an analog receiver, are harder to tune - to hit the center of the station's bandwidth precisely. If not tuned precisely, there's a substantial amount of distortion. To be fair, I've never used a digital AM stereo tuner, so that could solve such problems. But then there's the processing needed to keep the station's loudness at a level where it can drown out much interference. Then there's the receiver's own AGC.
FM has its own issues, the pre-emphasis curve foremost among them. Usually, though, if an FM station sounds like, you know that the station intentionally did that for whatever sick reason it had for doing so. An AM station has much less control over its audio destiny.
But...all this is what mathematicians call "a necessary but not sufficient condition". Programming that enough of an audience will be interested in also has to be part of the equation. Right now, that's the core problem. Audiences have many more choices that are more interesting to them than what's on FM, or AM. Traditional radio is stuck in a rut. It has been for decades, but that was not so evident because there was a lack of alternatives. Now there are plenty of alternatives.
Interesting you mention this. I'm in Emeryville this morning (yeah, I go to all the exciting places), listening to KITS. A few minutes ago I hear a liner that went something like this: "Live 105! I listened 30 years ago. It's the best station ever!"
Well, that's where my nostalgia for it comes from, too. But I'm just a year behind you (Mike) on the wheel of life. People like us aren't going to be the future.
To give Live 105 some credit, it's making an effort to balance new music with the classics in the alternative genre. But the new stuff bears a strong resemblance to the older stuff.
When you said "AM stereo" I am assuming you are referring to today's "HD Digital" system and not the purely analog AM Stereo systems of the 80s. (or are you?)
No, it can't. Not even close.
It's actually 10kHz, 5kHz for IBOC use. But even at 10kHz, the distortion, terrestrial noise, and greatly reduced stereo options, make it entirely inferior to any other form of aural media.
You either need to have your hearing checked, or are suffering from some form of alternative history/reality.
His Time Tunnel is malfunctioning.....
I'm referring to the analog systems. Usual listening to those was on a Sony SRF-A100.
I have a Sony SRF-A100 portable, as well as a Sansui TUD-99AMX tuner. The Sansui features pushbutton tuning and although there are a few things to complain about with this tuner, the AM audio is actually very good. Rather than a simple diode it uses a synchronous detector.
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