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FM Stereo

T

ThePowerCow

When did FM stations start consistently broadcast in stereo? I'm guessing late 60's/early 70's.
I heard an aircheck from the 50's that required one FM radio and another one on the AM at least 6 feet apart. (WCOS AM/FM) Not counting those.
 
ThePowerCow said:
When did FM stations start consistently broadcast in stereo? I'm guessing late 60's/early 70's.
I heard an aircheck from the 50's that required one FM radio and another one on the AM at least 6 feet apart. (WCOS AM/FM) Not counting those.
Click to expand...
The analog FM stereo system used today began in 1961.

A search on "when did FM stereo begin" will give the answer:

"The FCC approved stereo FM broadcasting in April 1961. This approval followed a two-year period of field testing and specified the start of stereo broadcasts at midnight local time on June 1, 1961. The standard adopted was a multiplexing system developed by GE and Zenith"

The adoption was not extremely fast, as the conversion then was expensive, there was not a wealth of stereo product for some formats, and consumers did not have radios. As the decade advanced, more and more stations went stereo and by the end of the 60's almost all were stereo.
 
I don't know how accurate the stereo indications are in my copy of Vane A Jones's North American Radio-TV Station Guide from 1973, but it shows far from pervasive adoption. For class B/C channel 99.9, for example, out of 37 on-air stations 22 are listed as stereo (59%). For class A channel 101.7, only 12 out of 47 (26%) are listed as stereo.
 
This is highly unscientific, but the word "stereo" tended to be only in station listings in the Broadcasting Yearbook. Starting from 1964 (the first edition where that occurred), searching on that word on David's site year by year should give us some approximate numbers.

1964: 117
1965: 159
1966: 164
1967: 188
1968: 198
1969: 206
1970: 235
1971: 253
1972: 256
1973: 240
1974: 262
1975: 242
1976: 260
1977: 272
1978: 298
1979: 293
1980: 308
1981: 311
1982: 311
1983: 320
1984: 342
1985: 371
1986: 389
1987: 454
1988: 457
1989: 472
1990: 490

Of course, this is not accurate because there may have been other references to the word and the listings are only as accurate as the stations themselves reported, but it looks like 1987 was when stereo on FM was pretty much ubiquitous.
 
secondchoice said:
Never personally heard a quad radio. Was it was a forerunner to "surround sound"?
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Yes, it was a form of surround sound, with four speakers placed in a box pattern. Today I suppose it would be called 4.0 audio.

I recall the old KZEW in DFW would occasionally broadcast a test tone for adjusting quad receivers. It was IIRC sort of a steady pulsing sound. Anyone remember that or how it worked?
 
JJSPC said:
Quite a few small town FM's were still mono until the early 80's.
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When KIKO-FM came on the air at 100.3 kHz in Globe in the early 1980s, the station broadcast only in mono. It didn't change to stereo until it became (going by memory) KEYX-FM with an alternative/top 40 mix in the summer of 1986 that targeted Phoenix's eastern suburbs.
 
K.M. Richards said:
Yes, but relatively few stations adopted it. Most that did were AORs for specials.
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And even fewer people had the proper equipment necessary to play it. The only member of my family to have a quadrophonic system was one of my mom's sister's husbands. He was a wealthy classical music nut who had a quadrophonic system set up in his home. I remember that he once played, in my presence, the first few songs off of the quadrophonic version of The Carpenters' 1973 release, "The Singles 1969-1973." The idea was that you could hear even better stereo separation--but human beings have only two ears and, after a while, it became too hard to focus on where the different sounds were coming from.
 
NoWayNoCC said:
Wasn't quadrophonic also allowed in the mid-'70s?
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Javeed Jafri's "Let The Universe Answer" site has a couple of Quad broadcasts from KPAT-FM in Berkeley in June of 1972 (it took a bit of detective work in the comments to nail down the station and the story behind the shows, but it led to connecting, 51 years after the broadcasts, with Richard Fitzmaurice, who was one of the disc jockeys recorded.

lettheuniverseanswer.com

Quad Radio Broadcasts + K101 San Francisco June 1972

Share on Social MediaxfacebookemailI have a modern day Home Theater system that plays surround sound but I wanted to experience 1970’s era Quad. The least expensive way to do that for me was to purchase a vintage Dynaco Quadapter which I have done. I was hoping to hear some Beach Boys music...
lettheuniverseanswer.com
 
bigdonho said:
I remember an engineer saying "If God wanted us to have quadrophonic, He would have given us four ears." Also, Radio Shack at one time sold "quadrophonic headphones." Like ultra heavy gauge speaker wire, I can't believe some people fell for that.
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But again, the sounds would blend, as some stereo puts the sound in the center and not off to the side.

Quad is best described as an early, failed attempt at surround, which today we take for granted.
 
NoWayNoCC said:
Wasn't quadrophonic also allowed in the mid-'70s?
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Matrixed quad systems like SQ, QS, and EV-4 work over any two-channel stereo format, so any stereo radio station that plays one of those recordings instantly become a "quadraphonic radio station", even today. But the front-to-rear separation isn't nearly as good as discrete quad systems, in which the four channels of audio are kept separate.

Various methods of using a subcarrier to transmit discrete rear channel audio were experimented with in the 1970s, but none became a standard. Lou Dorren, who worked with JVC and RCA to develop the CD-4 Quadradisc system, claims the FCC chose his method of discrete quad FM in 1983, but actually all the Reagan-era FCC did was deregulate FM subcarriers and allow stations to use them for anything as long as it doesn't cause any interference.
 
ted chittenden said:
And even fewer people had the proper equipment necessary to play it. The only member of my family to have a quadrophonic system was one of my mom's sister's husbands. He was a wealthy classical music nut who had a quadrophonic system set up in his home. I remember that he once played, in my presence, the first few songs off of the quadrophonic version of The Carpenters' 1973 release, "The Singles 1969-1973." The idea was that you could hear even better stereo separation--but human beings have only two ears and, after a while, it became too hard to focus on where the different sounds were coming from.
Click to expand...
Memphis had a quadraphonic FM station in the late '70s, WQUD. I didn't have the equipment, and given the musical content of the station -- sleepy, bland MOR -- I was never going to.
 


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