AM Radio: Nice Dissection

[buster2]

Interesting article.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/08/05/am-radio-signing-off

 

[davideduardo]

Interesting article.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/08/05/am-radio-signing-off

At the risk of cross-posting, I put this on one of the city forums...

The article is not totally factual.

The most significant error is in not recognizing that...

• AM doesn't sound as good as AM.
• Most sprawling cities and metros outgrew all but a very few signals by around 1960, leaving many people with few strong choices
• AM noise levels started a climb even NASA would be envious of somewhere in the early days of dimmers in the following decade or so
• The growth of FM brought on by the forced end of simulcasting generally increased the viable signals in each market by three to four times, meaning the audience was further fragmented.

The author also misses the boat... but walks off the dock anyway... by blaming the ASCAP / BMI disputes for a much more significant impediment to the playing of recorded music... Petrillo's AFM and its incredibly onerous requirements about trading what the British call "needle time" for live music hours.

Another nearly-Luddite observation involves night listening to AM as if radio had somehow killed that time of the day... when in fact all but a few dozen AMs out of about 5 thousand have smaller coverage at night. The real death to night AM listening came as a result of the lifting of the TV freeze 60 years ago, a fact the writer conveniently ignores.

All in all, it is totally revisionist history with just enough fact to make it seem credible to those who don't study the industry's past; it has the intellectual honesty of Putin.

 

[michael hagerty]

And the use of the Heywood murder-suicide was gratuitous and tasteless.

 

[davideduardo]

And the use of the Heywood murder-suicide was gratuitous and tasteless.

And, besides being singularly in poor form, the device ultimately failed.

It was like using Marilyn Monroe's death as a sign that cinema was nearing it's end.

 

[satech]

The real death to night AM listening came as a result of the lifting of the TV freeze 60 years ago, a fact the writer conveniently ignores.

The FCC initially anticipated that TV would completely replace radio. That's why they allocated so many UHF channels that ended up never being used -- to give enough room for every radio station to turn into a TV station.