A/B AM/FM comparison of KNX before switch to sports

[xkxrx]

Richard Wagoner of LA Radio Waves has a poll on his site debating if AM with a good tuner sounds just as good as FM. It includes audio clips that he recorded that you don't know which is which. He won't reveal the answer until after the poll closes, so you may want to save the link and check on it later this week.

Here's the article in the LA Daily News which includes a link to the poll. After you vote you'll see the results. There are only 33 people voting so far, so maybe we can double that amount for Richard.

Is AM radio dead? No. Will it ever dominate? Also, no.

The experts say AM is dead, but columnist Richard Wagoner thinks most of AM’s problems are self-inflicted.

www.dailynews.com

 

[ChannelFlipper]

Richard Wagoner of LA Radio Waves has a poll on his site debating if AM with a good tuner sounds just as good as FM. It includes audio clips that he recorded that you don't know which is which. He won't reveal the answer until after the poll closes, so you may want to save the link and check on it later this week.

Here's the article in the LA Daily News which includes a link to the poll. After you vote you'll see the results. There are only 33 people voting so far, so maybe we can double that amount for Richard.

Is AM radio dead? No. Will it ever dominate? Also, no.

The experts say AM is dead, but columnist Richard Wagoner thinks most of AM’s problems are self-inflicted.

www.dailynews.com

Gotta love Richard and his one-man army out to save the AM Band.

 

[TheBigA]

Wagoner notes there haven't been a lot of participants "yet" in his poll. The reason might be there are fewer readers of print newspapers than there are listeners to AM radio.

 

[michael hagerty]

Richard Wagoner of LA Radio Waves has a poll on his site debating if AM with a good tuner sounds just as good as FM. It includes audio clips that he recorded that you don't know which is which. He won't reveal the answer until after the poll closes, so you may want to save the link and check on it later this week.

Here's the article in the LA Daily News which includes a link to the poll. After you vote you'll see the results. There are only 33 people voting so far, so maybe we can double that amount for Richard.

Is AM radio dead? No. Will it ever dominate? Also, no.

The experts say AM is dead, but columnist Richard Wagoner thinks most of AM’s problems are self-inflicted.

www.dailynews.com

So---all you need is a...43-year-old tuner?

And, frankly---neither of those samples sounds very good. If I have to guess, I'll say sample 1 is the AM and sample 2 is the FM, but a more instructive A/B would be to take recordings made from that same tuner 43 years ago and today. Between "make it as loud as possible" processing and Voltair, the sound of most commercial radio has been massively degraded.

 

[ted chittenden]

So---all you need is a...43-year-old tuner?

And, frankly---neither of those samples sounds very good. If I have to guess, I'll say sample 1 is the AM and sample 2 is the FM, but a more instructive A/B would be to take recordings made from that same tuner 43 years ago and today. Between "make it as loud as possible" processing and Voltair, the sound of most commercial radio has been massively degraded.

While I voted the reverse of you on which tuner is which, I think your points are very valid. Also, Mr. Wagoner does not ask the age of the participants in his nonscientific poll and I would guess that that age is probably a great deal older than most students entering college for the first time. And while I think there are more things that could be done to make AM more viable (in fact, I think I would mourn the loss of the band precisely because of its nighttime skywave propagation output), I don't think there is a lot of interest among the young in any of that.

 

[Mark Roberts]

Several things.

How many people have a Carver tuner at their fingertips? Even I don't (couldn't afford it when it came out...I worked in radio then).

Then there are the samples. As best as I can determine, they're variable bit-rate MP3s at an estimated rate of 192 kbps. Some people may hear artifacts. There also may be interaction with that gawdawful Voltair.

The samples are voice and not music. They also weren't made at the same time. This isn't a huge obstacle but should be noted nonetheless.

I'm assuming the Carver tuner does not support the NRSC de-emphasis curve, so it's possible that the AM high end is exaggerated a bit. I hear that on sample 1. Samples 1 and 2 actually do sound pretty close, but I hear less Voltair mangling on sample 1 as compared to sample 2. So that confuses the picture.

So---all you need is a...43-year-old tuner?

All other things being equal, that shouldn't make a difference, other than for the absence of NRSC de-emphasis. Most hi-fi tuners focused on their FM performance, with AM being an afterthought. That's been true for decades. Even on FM, tuners from 30 or 40 years ago, properly maintained, will sound better than newer tuners. But...tuners often need to be realigned and re-capped after a period of time. I do much of my FM listening on a 36-year-old tuner that was recapped and realigned about 20 years ago. To my ears, it sounds better than newer radios or tuners I have, except for the Qodosen DX-286 portable radio, which uses the TEF6686 chip that many car radios employ. But that's on FM. On AM, I still have one working Sony SRF-A100 radio, famous for its wideband reception on AM but that model is notorious for having leaky capacitors, which will affect sound quality or even the ability to work at all. So the point here is that there are multiple variables that can affect what you hear, and all other things usually aren't equal in the real world.

And, frankly---neither of those samples sounds very good. If I have to guess, I'll say sample 1 is the AM and sample 2 is the FM, but a more instructive A/B would be to take recordings made from that same tuner 43 years ago and today. Between "make it as loud as possible" processing and Voltair, the sound of most commercial radio has been massively degraded.

Particularly on sample #2, I think the Voltair was cranked way up. The traffic anchor at the start of #1 had, in my opinion, a particularly harsh and grating voice, which also makes comparison more difficult. I'm guessing #1 is AM and #2 is FM because of just a bit of "peakiness" on #1 caused by the mismatch between the tuner's AM section and NRSC pre-emphasis of the signal, something it wasn't designed for.

In any event....

Quote:
"So here we are. The experts say AM is dead, yet as I have been saying for years, most of AM’s problems are self-inflicted. It is the programming more than anything else, as it is with FM, or any entertainment source, since humanity began."

He's not entirely wrong, but he misses his own point. People went to FM for a variety of reasons, including the programming. They're now leaving FM for streaming because of the programming, even at the expense of differently degraded sound quality. So why is he spending so much effort on comparisons of sound quality?

 

[TheBigA]

People went to FM for a variety of reasons, including the programming. They're now leaving FM for streaming because of the programming, even at the expense of differently degraded sound quality. So why is he spending so much effort on comparisons of sound quality?

But they went to FM at the absolute highest point of AM radio programming quality, with live & local talent playing timeless music. That still wasn't enough to retain the 20 shares that these stations had once enjoyed. We can never expect AM programming to ever return to that level. But why should it, since even then it wasn't good enough to prevent the audience exodus.

Same with FM radio. There's absolutely no live & local talent and no format that will cause people to throw away their digital devices and buy Carver tuners. That day has passed. People want control. They want what they want when they want it, and they want it for free, People didn't leave AM last week or last year. It happened in the last century! It started 50 years ago. So it's not about the programming.

 

[Steel Nerves]

This is an amusing exercise (and I picked #2 because #1 seemed to have more artifacts) but all I have to do is go to my car radio and switch back and forth between AM and FM on a simulcast station. There's no comparison until I get to the very fringes of the FM signal.

 

[KilowattKat]

Although the survey sample is small, it should be noted that reception issues had an edge over sound quality, for not listening to AM.

I would like to see a comparison between AM and FM with music. And with two completely different stations. I also chose #2 as FM...

 

[kevtronics]

I'm assuming the Carver tuner does not support the NRSC de-emphasis curve, so it's possible that the AM high end is exaggerated a bit.

The Carver TX-11b has switchable NRSC de-emphasis:

Carver TX-11b

Carver TX-11b tuner technical review

k6sti.neocities.org

 

[Steel Nerves]

So---all you need is a...43-year-old tuner?

Which leads to the question, has there been any improvement in AM radio receivers in the last 43 years? And since most radio listening is done while driving, has there been any improvement in vehicle AM radios in the last 43 years? It really doesn't matter how good what comes out of the transmitter is, if the station is screwing around with the original fidelity, and the receiver is so poor it can't tell the difference.

 

[michael hagerty]

Which leads to the question, has there been any improvement in AM radio receivers in the last 43 years? And since most radio listening is done while driving, has there been any improvement in vehicle AM radios in the last 43 years? It really doesn't matter how good what comes out of the transmitter is, if the station is screwing around with the original fidelity, and the receiver is so poor it can't tell the difference.

No. If anything, they've gotten worse, and as good as the Carver is/was, in 1983, the quality of AM receivers had declined overall.

 

[kevtronics]

Which leads to the question, has there been any improvement in AM radio receivers in the last 43 years? And since most radio listening is done while driving, has there been any improvement in vehicle AM radios in the last 43 years?

The one in my 2024 Nissan is remarkably sensitive and selective on AM, and doesn't have any internally generated noise from the car's electronics. The downside is that like most modern car radios, it's based on the narrowband European standard and the audio has a brickwall filter at 4.5 kHz. Still, for talk programming, on a well-processed station it's perfectly listenable.

The biggest improvement they could do would be to implement a synchronous detector. It is a revelation to hear AM without all of the distortion caused by directional nulls and selective fading. Some Chrysler car radios used a Motorola C-Quam decoder chip not to receive AM Stereo, but rather just to provide synchronous detection... but that was 25 years ago.