Cousin Brucie Returns To 77WABC To Host Saturday Night Rock & Roll Party

[L Chanon Gade]

AM Radio itself doesn't sound like it once did. There have been a number of side by side comparisons between off-air recordings done in the 60s and the same done now. The bandwidth has shrunk. The noise floor has increased.

Those are two factors. A third is the nature of today’s airchains.

WABC is set up for talk. The signal probably goes through several conversions enroute from Morrow’s house to studio and then transmitter.

The result is a sort of hash when hit with complex waveform such as music.

The earlier run of Saturday oldies was somewhat better sounding, probably due to in-studio origination and equipment but still didn’t sound like AM radio at it’s technical peak in the 1970’s.

I only heard about 20 min of the first show, but Bruce sounded a lot better than he had on Satellite. He voice faltered a bit at times, but the enthusiasm was still there and he seemed focused.

As of now, he is the only thing worth listening to on that grim station

LCG

 

[davideduardo]

Those are two factors. A third is the nature of today’s airchains.

WABC is set up for talk. The signal probably goes through several conversions enroute from Morrow’s house to studio and then transmitter.

The result is a sort of hash when hit with complex waveform such as music.

The earlier run of Saturday oldies was somewhat better sounding, probably due to in-studio origination and equipment but still didn’t sound like AM radio at it’s technical peak in the 1970’s.

I only heard about 20 min of the first show, but Bruce sounded a lot better than he had on Satellite. He voice faltered a bit at times, but the enthusiasm was still there and he seemed focused.

As of now, he is the only thing worth listening to on that grim station

LCG

I'd actually guess that the music was being played from the studio, and the issues have to do with the move of WABC as part of the sale to Mr. Cat. The issue seems to be not having the right stereo to mono setup, not a bandwidth or quality issue. But I could be wrong on that...

The audio from Mr. Morrow's location to the studio is not going through anything more than an in at the home and out at the studio. No different than a network show.

The reason AM radio does not sound like it did in the 60's involves several issues. One, the 10 kHz rolloff of all audio. Second, the fact that radios today have much worse AM circuitry than before to avoid interference and to save money.

 

[davideduardo]

WABC is set up for talk. The signal probably goes through several conversions enroute from Morrow’s house to studio and then transmitter.

You know that airchains can have a variety of standard and custom presets that can be set to operate according to the programming?

Music stations that have sports can switch for each environment. No manual settings, no harder than setting your lamp timer.

 

[mjb1124]

And, since this was noted by many one the NYRMB, including by friends of Cousin Brucie, I'm sure they are making efforts to fix the issue by this coming weekend.

I listened to the Labor Day replay, and could hear the lead vocals on "Twist and Shout" and "Surf City" just fine, so they must have fixed something. Though some other songs like "Mony Mony" had background vocals that sounded like they were underwater.

 

[Theater of My Mind]

Digital technologies generally haven't been kind to AM.

1. When digital tuners came along they seemed to cut the frequency response of the receiver more heavily than those with analog dial tuners, and they've become progressively worse over time.

2. Most CDs and digital music files, including remastered oldies, use "loudness war" style mastering that brickwalls the dynamic range. if you load it into an audio editor you'll see that it already looks heavily compressed and limited. That waveform is then sent into the radio station's audio chain which compresses it even more making it sound like total garbage, especially on AM where today you're just hearing the lower midrange audio frequencies and losing the high frequencies that would normally make things sound more intelligible.

3. Modern digital processing sounds nothing like 60s & 70s analog processing. If you're old enough to remember hearing AM radio on a wideband off-air monitor, yes the highs were crisp and extended but at the same time there was heavy distortion in the upper midrange. That's the vocal range with the most energy, half of which is sadly filtered out of the response curve of today's narrow band AM tuners. Stations in that era cranked the compression and limiters to the max and the analog circuitry sounded overdriven, especially in that frequency range, like a volume control at 11. On a normal radio it didn't really sound distorted, but had a sort of edge that helped gave AM its distinct character.

Today's digital processing manipulates waveforms totally differently. It can fit everything into a tiny envelope of dynamic range without sounding distorted, so there's none of that vintage analog edge now. But also, if you squeeze every drop of dynamic range out of the waveform, and then the receiver filters out all the audio above 3,000 Hz, not only does everything sound like utter sh*t but it's hard to even understand spoken word, never mind enjoy music. That's today's AM radio, and I didn't even mention the further degradation if MP2/MP3 files are used in the audio chain, or the effects of Voltaire yet.

 

[Kelly A]

Digital technologies generally haven't been kind to AM.

1. When digital tuners came along they seemed to cut the frequency response of the receiver more heavily than those with analog dial tuners, and they've become progressively worse over time.

2. Most CDs and digital music files, including remastered oldies, use "loudness war" style mastering that brickwalls the dynamic range. if you load it into an audio editor you'll see that it already looks heavily compressed and limited. That waveform is then sent into the radio station's audio chain which compresses it even more making it sound like total garbage, especially on AM where today you're just hearing the lower midrange audio frequencies and losing the high frequencies that would normally make things sound more intelligible.

3. Modern digital processing sounds nothing like 60s & 70s analog processing. If you're old enough to remember hearing AM radio on a wideband off-air monitor, yes the highs were crisp and extended but at the same time there was heavy distortion in the upper midrange. That's the vocal range with the most energy, half of which is sadly filtered out of the response curve of today's narrow band AM tuners. Stations in that era cranked the compression and limiters to the max and the analog circuitry sounded overdriven, especially in that frequency range, like a volume control at 11. On a normal radio it didn't really sound distorted, but had a sort of edge that helped gave AM its distinct character.

Today's digital processing manipulates waveforms totally differently. It can fit everything into a tiny envelope of dynamic range without sounding distorted, so there's none of that vintage analog edge now. But also, if you squeeze every drop of dynamic range out of the waveform, and then the receiver filters out all the audio above 3,000 Hz, not only does everything sound like utter sh*t but it's hard to even understand spoken word, never mind enjoy music. That's today's AM radio, and I didn't even mention the further degradation if MP2/MP3 files are used in the audio chain, or the effects of Voltaire yet.

These are all valid points. The only thing I would add, are modern single-chip tuners, AM or FM, have built-in variable threshold ALC (Automatic Level Control) baked in with the audio low pass filters. Essentially that means dynamics of the demodulated audio are compressed again in the receiver.

I've tried to explain this to PD's who cherish the idea of being the loud one on the dial. That most of the modern radios won't let you. The harder a station modulates, the more that ALC squashes it. The end result is; it just sounds worse.