I appreciate your reply, Lino, so let me expand on what I said. I’ll be referring both to your original post at the top of this thread and to your Reply No. 9.
These bird-fed formats don't fare as well as local orgination due to cascading compression, still the signal is a full 5 "bars" and if HD gets into the sort of sets that people actually buy, it will give 1560 and Radio Disney a competitive outlet for it's target audience.
You’re right about the effects of cascading codecs, even if you
are understating the seriousness of the problem. But as for this sorry excuse for quality audio making RD “a competitive outlet for it's target audience,” I don’t agree. More about that below.
A lot of what you are remembering [about the sound of AM car radios from the Fifties and Sixties] is sentiment. [A] friend over in New Jersey went through a phase in the late 80s- early 90s of restoring early 1960's cars. I rebuilt the original radios for them. Naturally while I had them on the bench I did sweep response, and distortion tests.
Typically, these sets had either a single class A output amp w/6AQ5 or TO3 germanium finals in class B. Either way you were hard pressed to get 2-3 watts at less than 10% thd. AF response was humped via R-C filtering and tapped volume pot at approx 90Hz for bass and rolled-off heavily above 5KHz. This was done to cover ignition noise, off-tuning from slop in the mechanical preset mech and of course distortion from excessive level. Speakers typically are 5X7, 6X9 or 4X10 single cone.
I don't deny that this set up produced a satisfying sound in the closed, near field environment of a car but the realities were, cheap components heavily contoured response.
First, those 6AQ5, 12AQ5 or 6V6-GT single-ended output stages could sound pretty good. They were widely used not only in car radios during the “conventional” tube era (i.e., before special tubes using 12-to-15-volt B+ made possible “vibratorless” radios, usually with germanium outputs), but also in vacuum-tube TV’s. In either a car radio or a TV, the sound from a fairly efficient external speaker was quite good, as long as you turned the “tone” control almost fully clockwise to overcome the mid-bass boost of the “loudness” compensation.
But I’m not basing my assessment of those radios entirely on in-car performance. After reading an article in Popular Electronics, Electronics Illustrated or one of those about converting old car radios for home use, I did it with a ’52 Ford radio built by Bendix.
When I fed the detector output (from the “hot” side of the volume control) to a mono hi-fi amp and an old coax speaker, I was amazed. Granted, there was no real treble when it was properly tuned, but the midrange sounded far more open and natural than what I heard doing the same thing with an “All-American Five” AC-DC table radio – and yet the ’52 Ford had far better selectivity, despite the fact that they used the same single IF tube (6BA6 or 12BA6) and comparable IF transformers.
So why did the Ford have both better fidelity
and better selectivity? I suspect because those old car radios had an IF of 262.5, instead of the 455 standard used in home and portable radios since the Thirties, and in car radios since the mid-Seventies. With the same “Q,” the transformers with the lower frequency would have only about 58 per cent of the bandwidth, yielding an extremely muffled sound. But if the transformers were over-coupled—the first very slightly and the second only moderately—they would yield a relatively “flat-topped” IF curve with steeper skirts than two critically-tuned transformers can provide. (Perhaps Tom Wells could weigh in on this question!)
Jerry (One-Note) delColliano; I read that Disney column and several others where he refers to it. Without going into the whole psycho-dynamics of why college kids imbue odd things with significance, ask yourself if Radio Disney actually had an in with this highly desirable audience, don't you think it would show up somewhere in the ratings?
Mr DelColliano has an axe to grind with an industry that he once gave his all and best years to, and got treated shabbily in return. In my theater career, I worked with several once-prominent designers who were working their way down and I was working my way up. It was hubris on my part to advise some of them, but if in due course they unloaded to me, I said "take the first college job you find, benefits, vacation, security". Then kibitz from a safe distance.
I wasn’t referring to the post where Jerry reported that some of his USC students had fond memories of Radio Disney. I remember how during my high school and clooege days, many of us fondly recalled Howdy Doody – though we had pretty much outgrown the show by age 10.
No, I was intrigued by an earlier post, where he had discussed to the popularity of RD with its predominantly female 8-12 “’Tween” target audience.
When I listened, I noticed that it was a mix of country crossovers, selected Hot AC, outside CHR and a lot of Disney’s own acts. The latter are songs from High School Musical 1 & 2, Hannah Montana and other Disney productions, and a few Disney odds and ends that are generally well-done, ingratiating, borderline bubble-gum efforts. Though it was hardly my cup of tea, I thought the music mix should be perfectly palatable to parents.
A recent conversation with a younger colleague, a Hot AC listener herself, confirmed this for me. Her 10-year-old daughter is a big RD fan, and she doesn’t find the music offensive at all. But get this: They both think it sounds better on the computer!
Now consider the implications of this. There’s only one national stream, without the local stations’ commercials – and for that matter, without the national spots, due to AFTRA restrictions. How can they make any money on that?
Of course most listeners prefer the stream. On my computer, the RD stream sounds much better than the HD AM aircheck you posted. Better than the analog AM? Yes and no. It has more audio bandwidth, but it’s a little rough (though not really awful).
But uncompromised AM (
sans IBOC!) would have a richer, more vibrant sound, even on today’s less than optimum AM radios.
Once internet radio in cars reaches a viable penetration level, RD should be able to sell a lot of time to advertisers who want to reach the Radio Disney moms. In the meantime, ditching IBOC would help a little – by improving S/N and “opening up” the sound (though the latter improvement wouldn’t be too dramatic on most of today’s radios) – but it would help only in the areas where Disney’s ragtag collection of bargain-basement AM signals provide adequate coverage (and aren’t being jammed by somebody else’s IBOC).
Finally, about your comments on Jerry, I’ll just refer you to what so many of us have said before about resorting to ad hominem attacks.
I AGREE, and understand that you wish for the best as a qualified technician wishing to advance technology - as do most here - but is IBOC "the solution" or merely a poorly-marketed rouge - a distraction or detriment? Ihope prosperity for radio, but in my marketing engagement and industry, I don't see the current "HD scheme" going anywhere. :'( Please refute that if you will - with FACTS.