• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Turbo Z Z100 tribute station

Freak31 said:
Just found a new tribute station on my internet radio today, under the flag of NY'S ORIGINAL HOT 103/97 | NY'S HOTTEST MUSIC, a Z100 tribute station with the imaging and the music from the 80's and some 90's. Also the audio processing is like how it sounds back in the day.
a9.asurahosting.com

Turbo Z - The Classic Z100 NY Channel

a9.asurahosting.com a9.asurahosting.com
Click to expand...
Is this the work of @dylanpetit (from this thread)? Or did Frank Foti dust off his famous airchain hardware and set this up as a secret labor of love? :cool:

The processing in particular is legit and pleasingly vintage New York in the density and clipping departments. Almost too crunchy on certain songs. I took a peek in Audition, and the waveform and spectral views look like the demodulated. de-emphasized L and R from an XT2 or Vigilante -- thick freshly-mowed lawns for peaks coupled with a visually low-contrast spectral graph with few dark spots (a much less open sound than today's norms, but very appropriate for a proper 80s re-creation). There must be vintage equipment in use here... or a rather faithful emulation.

The Los Angeles sound in the 80s was similar to this, but we avoided the crunch and sacrificed a little loudness by not turning our clippers up to 11. We turned our StereoMaxxes and 222As up to 11 instead. We had that privilege, thanks to Mt. Wilson beaming every station of note into flat valleys which weren't forests of multipath reflecting skyrises. :)

Kudos to whomever is responsible. And extra thanks especially for choosing 192 kbit/s AAC-LC for the stream, including for the separate Hot 103/97 tribute stream. Makes a huge positive difference.
 
Last edited:
No it's from the same guys who setup the Hot 97/103 Tribute stream. I like the sound but I miss a bit wider stereo enhancement, that was the signature thing from Z100 back in the day. And maybe a bit fresher sounding high end, it sound a bit too muffled.

Also this station have a classic CHR format but also with the same kind of audio processing from back in the day, I thought an old Optimod 8100. But this sounds like more Z100-ish with that wide stereo: 80's & 90's HOT HITS! TOTALLY RETRO RADIO - Free Internet Radio - Live365
 
Last edited:
yeoldeschool said:
Is this the work of @dylanpetit (from this thread)? Or did Frank Foti dust off his famous airchain hardware and set this up as a secret labor of love? :cool:

The processing in particular is legit and pleasingly vintage New York in the density and clipping departments. Almost too crunchy on certain songs. I took a peek in Audition, and the waveform and spectral views look like the demodulated. de-emphasized L and R from an XT2 or Vigilante -- thick freshly-mowed lawns for peaks coupled with a visually low-contrast spectral graph with few dark spots (a much less open sound than today's norms, but very appropriate for a proper 80s re-creation). There must be vintage equipment in use here... or a rather faithful emulation.

The Los Angeles sound in the 80s was similar to this, but we avoided the crunch and sacrificed a little loudness by not turning our clippers up to 11. We turned our StereoMaxxes and 222As up to 11 instead. We had that privilege, thanks to Mt. Wilson beaming every station of note into flat valleys which weren't forests of multipath reflecting skyrises. :)

Kudos to whomever is responsible. And extra thanks especially for choosing 192 kbit/s AAC-LC for the stream, including for the separate Hot 103/97 tribute stream. Makes a huge positive difference.
Click to expand...
It sounds a little overmodulated for me but maybe it's my player.
 
Now if they could just program the seques in "Hollywood Hamilton" mode from back in the day, when he'd be busy recording a phone caller and didn't realize until it was almost too late that the song was in it's last gasps. He would frantically push the slider up to the max to squeeze the last few seconds of audio out of the song - it was quite noticeable and part of what made his 10p-2a show so entertaining back in the day!
 
A decade or two ago when the labels were doing large-scale analog master tape preservation (mass-digitizing multitrack masters, among others), it was evidently impossible for them to keep their new, Napster-raised generations of engineers' sticky fingers off the files being generated. Because massive collections of high quality multitracks (some I saw topped out in the hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes) began hitting KickAssTorrents and other bittorrent indexes. When you loaded those up in your favorite DAW, you got to hear most songs all the ways to their natural endings -- no fades.

Last "actual" 3 minutes of Ambrosia's "Biggest Part of Me": https://files.catbox.moe/xv0riw.mp3

Hamilton would have probably killed for this stuff. All that extra time for chatting up groupies on the request lines...
 
Last edited:
The music could be a bit faster in genre and more 'up', especially in combination with the fast-paced imaging. Sometimes I hear a quiet track or a quiet intro after a fast jingle. The transitions between music and jingle could also be a bit quicker.
 
I seriously doubt anyone can get the exact mid 80s sound.* CDs were first released in 1982 in Japan. When did the record companies start mailing out CDs? When was there a CD player that could stand the constant use a radio station would put it thru? In the mid to late 80s we still carted music until the hard drives got affordable so most likely there was a lot of music that was "analog" on a cart for a time. How much of the audio chain was still analog even if they played CDs in the studios? There was a rumor that Scott Shannon liked knobs instead of sliding pots on the control board.

* 40+ years I am sure I couldn't get any station re-created exactly just counting on memories.
 
I worked at a station just north of NYC for a few years doing weekends in the early 90s. They had just made the transition from all the music on carts to mostly CDs and... I absolutely HATED it because they were using two consumer CD players and more than a few times, I'd have the song all cued up and on "pause" and somehow it got un-paused so that when I brought it up on the board, it was 3/4 of the way done!

Regarding "Turbo Z - The Classic Z100 NY Channel" - it's great hearing the music from that era and the jingles again. I think the processing is sort of close to what the station was like in the late 80s. Definitely NOT the sound from the sign-on to 1986 years though.
 
There was a "learning curve" for me using CDs too. Once music got on Hard Drives on PCs everything got simpler unless Microsoft did an upgrade. We learned really quick to turn that feature off!
 
secondchoice said:
There was a "learning curve" for me using CDs too. Once music got on Hard Drives on PCs everything got simpler unless Microsoft did an upgrade. We learned really quick to turn that feature off!
Click to expand...

I exited that side of the business before hard drives and PCs came along, but have done some "cameo" shifts with the PC based systems and yes, it makes EVERYTHING so much easier.
 
To be on topic; I wonder if we're going to hear any other jingle packages on this stream. Because this is just one package with a voice-over guy, but Z100 has had so many jingle packages. I would like to hear a mix, because there have been even better ones, and also better voice-over guys, over the years.
 


Back
Top Bottom