DXing in Hawaii

[cyberdad]

Some things apparently never change. The audio on KORL was pretty bad as a top 40 station in the mid-60s when I was living there, and wasn't really any better during my '94 visit (when they were running CNN Headline News).

 

[radioman148]

When I was there in the late 70s their audio didn't seem that bad to me. It wasn't great, but not the worst either. I remember listening to their morning man at the time, Lan Roberts who used to work with Larry Lujack at KJR in Seattle.
Anyway today the audio on AM650 in Honolulu is easily the worst I've ever heard on a commercial AM station in any city. This is amazing to me when you consider the fact that they have one of the best signals in Hawaii.

 

[stormy01]

Seems like a "no brainer" for the engineer to tweak the audio for a better on-air "presence" Most radio stations most likely have some kind of equalization in their "air
chain" and have a "reference" receiver in order to listen to their off air signal to improve overall frequency response. Many AM's are only News/Talk or mainly Voice and
don't play music (or very little - the so called "bumpers"), yet some of them sound really decent just for voice....(I can't say who. I mostly listen to FM, satellite, CD's or MPs)
AM for me, is to catch the weather forecast or traffic reports most of the time. Or to DX!!!

Wouldn't management make the connection between a decent sounding signal that listeners could listen to for hours without "aural fatigue" and a signal that is so over
compressed that "we can be the loudest station in town" and people turn off after 15 minutes? (or turn the volume down so it's in the background)

Perhaps we have been "dumbed down" with today's audio, especially with the NRSC mask to accommodate "HD" Radio. I read somewhere that directional antennas
don't help matters either... Directional arrays and phasors I have read, tend to limit audio bandwidth. But directional is not the case of the Hawaii stations, which are almost
all omnidirectional.

I would have rather stations broadcast a cleaner sounding signal at a bit less overall volume or less compression (after all, we the listeners do have a volume control and
we can turn up the volume a bit if need be!)

But which broadcaster is willing to lower their volume or compression in a competitive environment in order to sound better? They are more concerned about "punch"
... do we "stand out" on the dial?... (increased man-made noise on the received audio is also a problem for AM reception in many urbanized areas, for which engineers have
increased their volume just to compensate for these increased noise levels)

 

[radioman148]

I don't normally listen to AM for music either, but the format was interesting--kind of a nostalgia oldies--Frank Sinatra followed by the Beatles, Beach Boys and maybe Frankie Laine. Similar to the "RealOldies 1690" format of a few years back.
It was amazing to me how horrible their audio was. Hugely distorted, muddy, etc.
All of this on a station that has as strong a signal as any Honolulu or any Hawaiian station.
They must just be letting the computer run with nobody there. Apparently they just want to keep the license.

 

[cyberdad]

It's slightly removed from Hawaii, but my current vote for "astonishingly bad audio" that I come across in my travels goes to 960 am (CFFX?) in Kingston, Ontario. I've had the same thought myself...."How can a music station (oldies) hope to compete with sound this muddy/Could somebody PUH-LEEZE tweak this". Sounds like listening to an analog telephone, circa 1960.

I think, however, that the plan is to fold this station or move it to FM. (perhaps Mimo can help me out with this one).

Back to my Hawaii days, the other am station with garbage audio (but a good signal) in the mid 60s, was KAHU, 940 out of Waipahu, running a C&W format.

 

[radioman148]

It's slightly removed from Hawaii, but my current vote for "astonishingly bad audio" that I come across in my travels goes to 960 am (CFFX?) in Kingston, Ontario. I've had the same thought myself...."How can a music station (oldies) hope to compete with sound this muddy/Could somebody PUH-LEEZE tweak this". Sounds like listening to an analog telephone, circa 1960.

I think, however, that the plan is to fold this station or move it to FM. (perhaps Mimo can help me out with this one).

Back to my Hawaii days, the other am station with garbage audio (but a good signal) in the mid 60s, was KAHU, 940 out of Waipahu, running a C&W format.

AM 940 Waipahu now runs an ethnic format.
Getting back to lousy AM audio I can't understand why these stations can't do something relatively simple to fix it. As Stormy mentioned it can't really be that difficult can it?

 

[davideduardo]

When I spent my year in Hawaii as a teenager, a buddy of mine lived in the same building as James Ownby, the guy who ran KNDI 1270. It was a shoestring operation, mostly brokered and the signal sounded terrible and also didn't get out very well. Very pathetic for 5kw.

That signal made it to NE Ohio many a time.

The issue in Hawai'i is that nearly every Oahu AM is diplexed, triplexed or quadraplexed into the few AM towers that exist. The mulltiple rejection networks and the necessarily narrow, high Q tuning for each station makes some of them sound less than perfect; some, like the old KGMB when Cece owned it, managed to sound good by bringing in engineers. The rest were mostly maintained by Alan Roycoroft's company, and could be less than terrific sounding.

The old KPOI, on the other hand, had plenty of punch all over the islands with 5kw on 1380. (I lived three blocks from their stick).

Once The Poi Boys like Jacobs and Rounds left, the station declined. Eventually, that tower got diplexed too... land values and zoning and such made building an AM very hard.

KHVH, when they had the towers on the Kaiser Hawaiian Village Hotel, sounded pretty nice, too.

1420 and 1460 at this point (mid 60s) were still a twinkle in someone's eye! In those days, no Honolulu station was running more than 10kw. I personally thought KULA on 690 probably had the best signal....although KGU on760 and KORL on 650 (in that order) were reasonably close.

But the 5 kw on KGMB, energized by 50 kw of talent from Aku, gave that station 30 shares most of the time.

 

[mimo]

It's slightly removed from Hawaii, but my current vote for "astonishingly bad audio" that I come across in my travels goes to 960 am (CFFX?) in Kingston, Ontario. I've had the same thought myself...."How can a music station (oldies) hope to compete with sound this muddy/Could somebody PUH-LEEZE tweak this". Sounds like listening to an analog telephone, circa 1960.

I think, however, that the plan is to fold this station or move it to FM. (perhaps Mimo can help me out with this one).

CFFX moved to FM on January 15th 2008. It's now a light rock station at 104.3 (or near there somewhere).

 

[radioman148]

>>But the 5 kw on KGMB, energized by 50 kw of talent from Aku, gave that station 30 shares most of the time>>

Didn't Aku end up on 590AM which was I believe KSSK?

 

[tomservo]

Perhaps we have been "dumbed down" with today's audio

You could start a whole 'nother thread just on the above subject alone, taking broadcasting out of the mix.

We have CDs with seemingly infinite dynamic range, yet modern music discs are compressed to a few dB of their life, worse than many CHR stations of yore. With the advent of little mp3 players, we've lost an entire bit of depth due to lossy compression, not to mention practically all spectral energy above 16 kHz (I'm sure newer codecs are better, but the gold standard mp3 format pretty much filters out everything "they" claim "you" can't hear.)

I've actually heard more complaints about movie soundtracks than praise for the incredible dynamic range. A lot of people would rather not flip on the stereo because "the dialog is too quiet and the kabooms too loud"!

It's almost ironic to me, then, that AM and its current lo-fi status is so heavily shunned when it comes to music format. It seems the general populace has overwhelmingly voted that they prefer over-compressed, lo-fi, fatiguing audio to high-quality, pristine stuff with high dynamic range. And yet no one will listen to a good AM station?

Just as the transistor radio age and the NRSC mask spelled the end of good quality AM radio, the portable music device is spelling the end of decent audio. One need look no further than the near-ubiquitous iPod™ with it's sub-par amplifier as proof. The Microsoft Zune™ doesn't even have a graphic equalizer anymore; apparently people are too stupid to understand the concept of them? Who knows what they think.

And don't get me started on the cadre of tin-eared engineers out there. Seems like for every one who wants their station to sound its best, there's one more who doesn't know a thing about decent sound processing/quality. I may not know the settings to make an Omnia sizzle, but I do know what crap sounds like and sadly, on both AM and FM, there's a lot of crap. So it doesn't surprise me in the least that such a powerful AM in such an interesting market would be left to rot.

Sorry for the digression.

 

[radioman148]

I read an article recently that some people are returning to vinyl because the sound quality is much "warmer" than digital.

 

[cyberdad]

David...

Thanks, as always, for your insights. I still can't get over the lousy-sounding KNDI signal getting into Ohio...on 1270 no less! But of course things were different in the 60s.

As for "The Poi Boys", the two of them that lived in my apartment comple were Steve Nicolet (super-nice guy...did evenings), and one other guy whose name I'm drawing a blank on...although I can still picture him. Not TR, Jacobs, Dave Donnely, or Bob "Beard" Lowrie...who were the resident studs in those days. As I recall, there was nothing else was on the KPOI stick at that time besides the FM. Being three blocks away, they were throwing harmonics all over the place on my Hallicrafters shortwave receiver. Then there was my K-POI day-glo bumper sticker.

And finally KGMB. I remember them as having a nice signal and good audio with 5kw on 590. I was in a Junior Achievement program with KTRG-TV (Channel 13). One of the engineers on the KTRG radio side (5kw at 990) had worked at KGMB. He was telling me that KGMB'S main signal issue was nighttime interference from the 590 in Spokane on the outer islands.

Aku? He was doing mornings on KGU in those days. Other talent I remember from then was Sam Fisk, who was doing a nighttime talk show on KULA (something of a novelty at the time), and Ted Sachs, morning man and PD at KORL. Met both of them. Lets just say that
Fisk was very gracious and approachable for a teenager interested in radio. Sachs was more of a "scowler" (but I wouldn't say he was rude.)

 

[radioman148]

KGMB on 590 would explain why when I first heard Aku in the 70s the call letters had changed, I believe to KSSK or maybe it was something else before they went to those calls.
Didn't Ron Jacobs do mornings on 690AM after he came back from California in the 70s or is my memory fading?

 

[gar hi]

I read an article recently that some people are returning to vinyl because the sound quality is much "warmer" than digital.

Interesting. I thought I was the only one who thought that way!

While CDs capture more range of sound frequency and get rid of noise, there's "something" about records that's missing in today's audio and it just can't be put into specific words.

It's the same reason I became an AM stereo freak in the early 80s.

There was something about hearing stereo on AM that was missing on FM.

I had to enjoy listening to AM stereo all alone and thought I was the only one who was interested in it.

 

[cyberdad]

I left in the spring of '65, and I believe Aku jumped to KGMB right after then. I didn't listen to him very much. I typically listened to top 40 with Ted Sachs (or Sax) on KORL during morning drive, then K-POI later. There was another top 40 station....KUMU, but they had a rather paltry signal with 1kw on 1500.

In my previous post, I neglected to mention Tom Moffat, another of the top jocks on K-POI in those days....but for the life of me, I don't remember Ron Jacobs. I know he was/is a legendary figure, but perhaps he was either working elsewhere or off-air during the winter of '64-65 when I was there. Or perhaps I just have a blank spot in my memory after 44 years. Aside from mornings, most of my listening was doing homework in the evenings with the previously mentioned Steve Nicolet, or later after midnight with Dave "Moose" Donnely.

Finally, I now remember the other "POI-boy" who lived in our apartment complex. Ron...or Ronnie...Temple...at least that was the name he used on the air. I seem to recall that he moved in a month or two before I left.

 

[radioman148]

I read an article recently that some people are returning to vinyl because the sound quality is much "warmer" than digital.

Interesting. I thought I was the only one who thought that way!

While CDs capture more range of sound frequency and get rid of noise, there's "something" about records that's missing in today's audio and it just can't be put into specific words.

It's the same reason I became an AM stereo freak in the early 80s.

There was something about hearing stereo on AM that was missing on FM.

I had to enjoy listening to AM stereo all alone and thought I was the only one who was interested in it.

You are not alone. There are a large group of people that feel that way. I wish I had kept the article I read on it about a month ago.

 

[radioman148]

I left in the spring of '65, and I believe Aku jumped to KGMB right after then. I didn't listen to him very much. I typically listened to top 40 with Ted Sachs (or Sax) on KORL during morning drive, then K-POI later. There was another top 40 station....KUMU, but they had a rather paltry signal with 1kw on 1500.

In my previous post, I neglected to mention Tom Moffat, another of the top jocks on K-POI in those days....but for the life of me, I don't remember Ron Jacobs. I know he was/is a legendary figure, but perhaps he was either working elsewhere or off-air during the winter of '64-65 when I was there. Or perhaps I just have a blank spot in my memory after 44 years. Aside from mornings, most of my listening was doing homework in the evenings with the previously mentioned Steve Nicolet, or later after midnight with Dave "Moose" Donnely.

Finally, I now remember the other "POI-boy" who lived in our apartment complex. Ron...or Ronnie...Temple...at least that was the name he used on the air. I seem to recall that he moved in a month or two before I left.

Jacobs was probably in California in 65 when you were in Hawaii. He returned to Hawaii, his home in the 70s & in the late 70s when I visited the islands he was back on the air out there. Before that I had never heard him, but I knew who he was.