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1320 WARL
- Thread starter MarcB
- Start date
MarcB said:
So far...this sounds like a rock-n-roll "oldies" format. I hope you wouldn't let yourself get boxed in that tight, and instead, widen the variety of music from the period......perhaps even throw in some of today's "neo-standards"....in other words.....modern covers of some of the great songs from "The Great American Songbook".
Oh....by the way....a power upgrade to 10KW wouldn't hurt either.
I hate this whole idea of music on AM. It sounds horrible and most people who want music only tune in FM anyway. Show me ratings of where there is even one music station on AM that makes it into the Top 10. I'm thinking possibly an ethnic format in a big city, if at all. But not by playing oldies music on an English speaking station located on an AM Frequency. These days..... and with good reason, you've got to put News / Talk or Sports on AM if you want any chance of getting good ratings.
N1WVQ said:
Yes and no. Yes, most radios sold these days have terrible bandwidth.
Yes, AM CAN sound good. IF engineers, not programmers, have control of the processing. IF systems are well maintained. IF the decision is made to go for audio quality rather than for distance/loudness. What????
All-talk stations don't need much in the way of audio quality. CRL still makes a device that squashed bandwidth down to noting but allows the signal to really get out there. It's loud and it has reach. Best example of good use of the device was the old WHDH-850 when they were exclusively talk. Put music through it and it sounds terrible.
Best example of excellence in audio was the old WJAR (920) Western Electric Doherty Linear 5-kW all "fire-bottle" transmitter built in about 1930 and kept as a backup well into the 1960s or beyond. When Roger Perry was doing a lot of their engineering he'd find any possible excuse to fire it up and, if you had a decent radio, you could tell immediately. Those transmitters, great as they were (WSAR's old GE, long gone) was almost as good), chewed up way too much power and couldn't be run economically. More, tubes were hard to find and pricey. Even more, you had to be an engineer, not just a license-school grad to make 'em sing.
Despite what a good engineer can get out of even today's transmitters there is so much electrical noise in the urban environment that it's a losing battle. The quality may be there as the signal leaves the antenna but, by the time all the trash messing up the spectrum gets through it with it the results are far from optimal. Plus, most of today's listeners have had their hearing ruined by blasting ear buds that it's questionable how much difference good audio quality makes.
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