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Boy They Sounded Good!!!!!

C

CrazeeCarroll1

Hey guys from soggy Rockford IL... We had some kick butt flooding up here with a lot of people having a lot of flood damage... We were lucky and just have a lot of water that has gone behind our basement walls which means a lot of things are being torn apart to do some major cleaning... Anyway while cleaning I came across some old tapes of 99.9 Kiss FM from the summer of 86 and boy was that one heck of a great sounding station.... I always knew they sounded good, but never as good as I discovered... I am curious to know what kind of processing and what kind of airchain they were using... Their audio from 20 years ago sounds better to me now than most stations sound today... The audio was loud and full yet it was pleasing on the ears... My wife could not believe how well they sounded and even more important how "in Your Face" they were... Just pondering while I am cleaning up... Have a good day... CC1
 
I wholeheartedly agree! The audio processing of the CHR stations around here from that era was far more pleasing to my ears than what I hear today. I have often wondered if some of that could be attributed to the fact that stations back then were using carts for all their on-air audio. Digital audio sounds perfect and clean but it doesn't match that "warm" sound characteristic you can only get from good quality analog magnetic tape. Z-100 and WROQ 95.1 (Charlotte) both had essentially the same sound -- processing-wise -- as Asheville's Kiss FM and both of them were also playing songs off of carts in those days. I have always been a radio junkie and I listened to all those stations a LOT back then.
 
Carroll, KISS was using your basic old Optimod 8100 with the "XT" chassis. Also, an Orban reverb was in line. A couple of Audio Prisms were used for a short time. The fun days............
 
WOW!!!!!! That was all... They had the audio that kicked the heck out of the other stations... I always liked the way WBCY sounded back in the mid eighties as well... before they changed to sunny I knew something was up because they backed way off on their audio and there was hardly no compression used before the flip... As for Z100 and ROQ they had almost the same processing, but ROQ was the first station I had ever heard do the +4 pitching and it really sounded strange till I got use to it... CC1
 
Z-100 also used the Optimod 8100, but with a separate reverb unit. That warm, full sound originated from Blue Capitol carts we used there, I dubbed the songs from the vinyl singles that came in, riding the audio on each dub-to-cart, maintaining a solid level until the fade on each one, something that is impossible to do while ripping CD's today, even with Cool Edit you can get the same sound!
I'd love to hear some of those 99.9 tapes!

Kahuna
 
Z-100 and WROQ indeed used the very same processors, and coincidentally, the engineers were very close friends.
 
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