Oh, yes. One time, when I paid in cash, they gave me change back entirely in $2 bills!
Lawrence was great in the 90s and a relief from Johnson County suburban people who only seemed to be able to talk about their kids, their decks, or the Chiefs.
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% Reduction - AM reception range - increased noise - 1920 to 2024
- Thread starter kfbkfb
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Lawrence was great in the 90s and a relief from Johnson County suburban people who only seemed to be able to talk about their kids, their decks, or the Chiefs.
Cool, I've always liked Love Garden since it seemed bigger than Kiel's. I don't remember them ever giving me $2 bills, but I haven't used cash there in probably 20 years. They have an online store now and I got some cool stickers from them, you can also get a grab bag of 45s and other stuff.
By the way, for avoidance of doubt, we're talking about a record/music store. Lawrence had several good ones, as befitting a university city.
So...anyone have a ballpark % reduction in usable AM signal coverage/reception range (2024 compared to 1920)?
aside:
Record stores - Peaches at 75th and Metcalf in O P KS - the perfect store for an outlier like me - I bought many Laservision videodiscs and prerecorded Beta HiFi videocassettes there.
Kirk Bayne
aside:
Record stores - Peaches at 75th and Metcalf in O P KS - the perfect store for an outlier like me - I bought many Laservision videodiscs and prerecorded Beta HiFi videocassettes there.
Kirk Bayne
Depends on the market, station, distance from the station, and saturation noise levels near the reception point. The reduction could be from 10% to 100%. Literally, Infinite variables.
Take two noise level readings, on 520 kHz and 1720 kHz, then sum them and divide by 2 to obtain the band's average. Repeat this at multiple locations in a grid pattern throughout a major city, summing all those sums and dividing by the number of sample sites. There's your ballpark % for 2024.
For a 1920 baseline, find one of those "electrosensitives" communes out in the middle of nowhere, where people live without modern electronics and at most have only incandescent bulbs and ancient early 20th century appliances that they keep running the way Cubans hold on to classic American cars. Then sample 520 and 1720, sum, and divide by 2.
Did that later become Wherehouse Music? I always preferred The Music Exchange in KC (RIP) and my brother liked Vintage Stock, further up Metcalf.
The 75th & Metcalf store had 4 names during the time I shopped there (1984-07 to 2003-03 [when it closed]), they had a large number of new prerecorded videocassettes sold at full list price (~$80/movie) when I first started going there in 1984.
anyway...back to AM radio in 2024...is there any advantage to streaming the AM radio station content in Stereo (provided of course that the AM plant is built for stereo) and promoting the way to hear the AM radio content in stereo by streaming the AM radio station?
Kirk Bayne
anyway...back to AM radio in 2024...is there any advantage to streaming the AM radio station content in Stereo (provided of course that the AM plant is built for stereo) and promoting the way to hear the AM radio content in stereo by streaming the AM radio station?
Kirk Bayne
There aren't any AM Stereo transmitters being built or supported any more. A lot of stations promote their app, but they don't advertise it as stereo audio.
You're mixing up the message and the medium.
ANY content provider that is an "AM station" in 2024 needs to be providing that content on other platforms beyond just AM radio if it intends to be heard by anyone under 50.
That's streaming, it's apps, it's smart speakers, it's FM translators or full-power simulcasts.
All of those mediums are usually stereo by default. If the programming is music-based, the default expectation here in 2024 is going to be that it's in stereo. If it's spoken word, it probably doesn't matter.
But while "hey, it's in stereo!" might have been a selling point in 1974, I don't think it does much to attract normal listeners fifty years down the road.
Right. I think that would be like motels still advertising their TVs as color at this point. It's just assumed.
Actually I think it's more like, "It's implicitly assumed your TVs are color TVs, and if, for any reason, they're not, there's something very wrong with you. (And how'd you even find any B&W TV's in the 21st Century?)"
The vast majority of media consumers don't know or care about the term stereo. They just know when they press that icon or tell their smart speaker to play whatever stream, music, or podcasts come out. The stereo effect is naturally there, but nobody identifies it as stereo. Tell them about stereo imaging, and watch their faces glaze with disinterest.
Only medical audiologists knew what the term stereo[phonic] meant before stereo music became mainstream in the 1950s. If people could learn then, audiences today can learn again, so that's not the problem. The problem is that listening to AM sounds like listening to scratched up, dirty vinyl records with an ear infection through an amplifier with a ground loop hum and its harmonics. That is why promoting stereo on AM today will go nowhere and it's also why stereo on AM in the 1980s started going somewhere before nosediving into the asphalt in favor of FM.
But, to what end? Do you think consumers would spend more time, or be more impressed with content if stereo was explained? When a literal supercomputer in your pocket can serve so many purposes, who would pay attention to an antiquated feature of an over one-hundred-year-old form of media?
As has been commented on this site many times; one of the big reasons AM stereo never caught on, besides Leonard Kahn suing everything that moved, was music listening on AM had already abandoned ship.
They should have done what Sony did, and just had radios that could get both Kahn and Motorola.
IBOC splatters all over adjacent channels, and interference had led to further decline. CKLW 800 was allowed a 15 kHz bandwidth using the Motorola system in Canada. From experience listening within a strong contour on a Sony SRF-A100 fed into a stereo amplifier, it sounded the same as FM to all but the most critical listener. I don't think the CKLW sidebands at 15 kHz were nearly as bad as the IBOC digital noise.
But the Sony radios were technically crap. It did neither modulation format well, especially Kahn ISB. Sure, you could hear some stereo imaging, but if you connected the receiver to a test on the bench, the specs were pretty pathetic.
Regular listeners don't know or care about sideband hash, just radio nerds or DX'ers. Those numbers are so small, that their concerns don't move the needle in importance.
Limiting the ability to at least start doing something different on the AM band because of some tiny minority hobby does nothing more than hasten its demise.
That's just BS. Band noise alone is a disqualifier. Besides, that isn't a real-world scenario, so none of it matters in this day and age, now does it?
Again, the majority of AM listeners never cared about that particular concern.
But Kahn so opposed a competitive marketplace and was so contrary to the initial FCC decision that he kept AM stereo from the public for about 5 years... long enough for FM to have taken over about 75% or more of the rated market music audiences. Too late.
But the issue, as presented about two decades ago at NAB by Bob Orban, was in the AM circuitry of radios. Orban studied a wide variety of car radios, portables and "kitchen" radios and found that above 5 kHz nearly all had rolled off into the inaudible range.
I know that it was an ideal situation with CKLW.
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Come to think of it, I recall Leonard sued Sony too for including a quasi-ISB tuner in their portable radio. Talk about more biting the hand that feeds.
When I was working with Bob Carver when he was developing a high-end AM stereo tuner, we found the same. That, and stations insisted on running asymmetrical modulation that caused the tuner a lot of problems. As Bob said publicly; working on an AM stereo receiver was the waste of an entire year of R&D.
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