dfaulkner said:
Another from the past that always sounded great is the old 1150AM side of KVIL.
I do remember working on KVIL AM back in the late 70's/early 80's. The processing was a Urei LA-4 into a Fairchild reverb then over the STL to the original 6 tower site off LBJ and 35 in Northwest Dallas. At the tower was one of those Inovonics 8 band compressor/limiters. I visited the site once with XRey who showed it to me. The processor was just setting on a table - no rack mount or anything....really kind of a shoddy set up, but it sounded great on the air. That AM was 1000 watts directional almost straight east. Ron used to laugh that it couldn't be hear a mile to the west but could be heard in downtown Tyler. That was almost true - it did have a very directional pattern.
When the FCC required them to split cast the AM from the FM, Dan Bell, Paul Davis, Marc Avery and I were hired to do that. We simulcasted morning and afternoons and split the midday and all weekends. Originally at the Park Cities studios, the AM control room was thrown together in what was a break room...very small and unlike the FM, a sit down setup. We played 45's exclusively and usually they were the old records that had been in the FM studio but were replaced with clean copies. Lots of "cue burn" (anybody remember - cue burn...?).
When we moved to Capitol Bank over Memorial Day weekend 1979, the AM studio was an exact copy of the FM studio. The thinking was if they both were the same, jocks who had to work both AM and FM shifts wouldn't have to adjust to being comfortable on either. It was probably the best equipped 1000 watt directional daytime only AM in the country. State of the art Ward Beck slide fader console, 6 ITC cart decks, 2 Technics turntables and 2 Neuman thousand dollar mic's! We even had AM only studio listener lines. Sadly, we were still playing those old 45's out of old teletype cardboard boxes! Still there was a charm to it all.
It was odd working on the AM because you rarely met anyone who heard the station. It did have listeners, a few times hitting a 1.5 to 2.0 in the ARB! Even at the station, they monitored the FM in the halls. I remember one day Ron had the engineers put a switch in so that the AM could be heard on the stations "house monitor" heard throughout the building. Some days the FM would be heard, some days the AM. It was cool to finally walk out of the studio and know at least 'someone' heard that last break!
When we did contests, we would do the same call out of a number or whatever as the FM. People's choice cash calls were similarly announced, but as "...we just made a call here at KVIL..." as opposed to "...I just made a call...".
Truthfully, all of us who worked on AM also usually did a shift or two on the FM, often on the weekends. We all dreamed of a fulltime FM gig but with the likes of Bill Gardner, Ken Barnett, Larry Dixon and Cat Simon, Mike Donahue and a few others hanging around, those chances weren't too great. I did eventually make it to late nights following Cat from 11pm-2am on the FM.
The night jock was responsible for singing off the AM at sunset. More than a few times the jock would forget and I would drive in aroudn 9:30pm and hear the AM still on. At night that AM directional probably blared all the way to Louisianna!
