"According to Peter Kanze (co-producer of Rewound) and Rob Frankel (who restores the airchecks), they're all produced in mono."
Yes I misstyped I meant that they are all produced in mono. I met Peter Kanze at the WOR tower demolition event earlier this year.
" A lot of the airchecks they get are from studio-quality feeds (including all the airchecks donated by the jocks and other WABC staffers, and about six hours worth donated by me), from the studio skimmer or the in-house feeds (which were pre-processing and pre-reverb), so there is no quality loss when the songs are edited back in."
Believe it or not years ago I made a trip to Lodi and the engineer at the facility let us hear the incoming feed which was sanse reverb. AT the time (using Harris MW 50's) they introduced the reverb at the transmiter site. Not only can I hear Rewound on the air, I have access and have recorded past Rewound broadcasts over a broadcast line onto Dat. Normally aitrchecks of that vintage were recorddd on a soundscribe or metrotech which ran at very slow speeds and so the quality was marginal at best. I'm now going to transfer some of this years rewound which I recorded from a Sangean HD radio on dat to my hard drive. I'll upload a demo for you to hear what I am talking about.
"WABC, in its music-radio days, had just as many commercials as they have now, but they were distributed differently throughout the hour, and the programming rules were such that you didn't notice the commercials nearly as much. Eighteen commercial minutes an hour was not uncommon during morning drive. Also, they had a rule that every commercial had to be "adjacent to program matter," meaning that you could not segue more than two commercials without some non-commercial programming element running (even if it was just a station jingle). I will say, however, that commercials were far more inventive and memorable in those days (just about every New Yorker over the age of 40 remembers, and can probably even sing, the Palisades Amusement Park song, the Schafer and Rhinegold beer jingles and the Castro Convertible ad). "
They didn't run anywhere near as many spots years ago. There were limits which the FCC set that have since been losened to the detriment of the broadcaster. As to how many it slips my mind but I will get a number if you need specifics. I know that in the past 15 years or so, the numbers of spots per hour has gotten way out of hand. When I used to do a nationally syndicated music program (Top 30 over 3 hours) we had 8 minutes of spots per hour. Now there are 8 minutes of commecial content per 20 minutes. As far as memorable spots are concerned, every generation has memories as they age. To us it might have been Palisades park, or Robert Hall. Time will tell what this generation will remember. When you run 10 minute stop sets it just becomes a wall of noise.
