How long will it be before AM radio fades away?

[TheBigA]

David Sarnoff thought FM was much clearer for the future and used it for TV...

That was not Sarnoff's choice. The FCC chose RCA's picture system, giving him a huge victory. But they forced him to use FM for the sound, which was something he didn't want to do.

 

[carolinaradio]

I can't believe anyone can listen to AM.

I have a Sony boombox (one like the typical consumer would have, likely) and can hardly get any of the AM's in my range. Car, maybe, but not inside. No obstructions either. There is a 50kW AM at 660 about 45 miles from here and I can not get it at all. There is a 1kw AM at 860 just down the road and I get bad interference with it. There are other AM's I should be able to get somewhat according to coverage maps, but nothing. Said receiver does GREAT with FM.

Unless someone is using a good receiver or has a good car radio, I don't know how they are even getting the stations indoors. I've even been near a lot of different AM stations (some low power) and can not receive them unless I'm in the car (then there are power lines, signs on the interstate, etc). Technology has made AM unlistenable...I avoid it at all costs.

 

[Tom Wells]

If you want to call something rescued from the deep freeze "seafood" OK, but it's a far cry from fresh steamed
Chesepeake Bay steamed crabs, fresh lake Perch or Walleye.

I have some newer radios from the 1980s that sound wonderful. Within the past 5 years I can think of some rados I've heard in Ford rental cars that also sounded wonderful...Chryslers, too.

Whoops, gotta go be electronic Doctor again. Will it be a stone knives and bearskins thing, or a network isssue...?

 

[Tom Wells]

False alarm...no issue at this time for electronic doctor.

But just before the previous post, I DID have one issue of stone knives and bearskins ( electrical magnetic clutch), and one network issue (server-router off due to power glitch).

Carolinaradio, sorry you live in such a noisy place. What steps have you taken to mininmize your own locally produced noise?

Don't just say "technology" has made AM unlistenable. Be accurate, say, SHODDY and POORLY engineered technology
makes AM unlistenable. What sort of area do you live in, small town, rural, modern suburban?

I love it when I'm told something can't be done.
It was great fun to cite a NASA patent to gain my own.
The maroons at NASA said it was impossible to get electrons to jump into thin air without high voltage stimulation or radioactive ionization....Oh, really?
Then they said it was impossible to measure voltages "near zero" and called it a "dead band"....Oh, really?
Sure, if you are hell-bent on using the WRONG TOOL for the job.
Haw Haw haw.
I make a living daily in the world of "can't be done".

 

[KeithE4]

Trying to convince people who listen to modern slop-engineered AM radios tuned to NRSC (or worse) hobbled stations that AM sounds good just as hopeless as trying to convince modern suburban dwellers that Red Lobster is NOT seafood.

Red Lobster isn't seafood?!?!? The food may not be as good or as fresh as a mom-and-pop restaurant in Maine, but it ain't a burger.

I prefer some static once in a while over multipath flutter and smashed flat compressed audio with no dynamics.

Wouldn't that have more to do with audio processing than the mode of RF transmission?

One reason AM sounds better is that there is less non-linearity in a well-designed AM detector than the average FM detector.

Again, that is your opinion. And most consumer-grade radios don't have a "well-designed" anything. They are designed to be cheap and work reasonably well for the price. Business decisions trump engineering ones 100% of the time.

I listen to my own music at home on the AM part 15. And when I hear the same recordings on FM, there's no question that my own sounds better (within the admittedly tiny range). Example : Kashmir by Led Zeppelin yesterday morning. No, I don't follow NRSC cutoff, and built my transmitter with an ear toward very high linearity, no iron in the audio path, and modulate on the grid of a 6SN7, one of the most linear types ever made. (Which is why they were so common in old TV circuits).

That's fine. But you're talking about a transmitter that you have 100% control over, and can design it how you please. But my guess is that if you designed a high-powered AM transmitter to those standards (assuming that NRSC goes away), how many would buy it?

My own station has audio up to 20 khz. An unfiltered feed from an FM signal with a stereo pilot shows up a 1 khz heterodyne on the spot 20 khz over, and can be seen on the scope. Sorry, but that's a fact.

Most people don't own scopes, nor can they hear to 20 kHz (I certainly can't). It's irrelevant to listeners.

I'm so sorry your AM and AM experience have been so poor. But to say that it cannot be better than your own experience is like saying you wish to remain ignorant.

Of course it can be. But it doesn't matter. The market made its decision 30 years ago: AM ain't cutting it anymore, and no amount of engineering will change that fact.

And I never said AM was intended to be nationwide. I'm saying that as currently practiced, it does not provide the greatest number of useful signals nationwide, but (especially at night) only serves those well within a few miles of the towers. Great swaths of the country hear little more than a bowl of mush at night due to overcluttered frequencies.

Except for live sports, there are few if any listeners to AM radio at night. The herd needs to be thinned, and I made some suggestions earlier in this thread, but in reality it probably won't matter.

I know what a bad filter cap sounds like, as well as leaky coupling caps and/or leaky failing bypass caps.

My radios aren't broken by age, because I can (and DO) fix any of the issues you mention. The breaking is due to FCC incompetence and abandonment of the duty they were commissioned to perform.

I've fixed a few old radios in my time as well, and I may again someday. The FCC's duty is to Congress, more-so than any other Federal agency "officially" controlled by the Executive Branch. They've pretty much ignored engineering in favor of politics, and as such, they've made some pretty dumb decisions (IBOC on AM being the worst). But as long as they have Congresscritters on their a**, things won't change.

Regarding the sound capabilities of AM, just don't say "It can't be" to someone who daily does so. Feel free to disbelieve, but don't say it can't be done.

I'm not saying it can't be done, because I know better. But with AM listening dropping like a rock, why would a station owner bother? There's no return on the investment.

 

[GeneSavage]

Multipath is an FM problem.

Dynamic range, as someone else pointed out, is a processing "problem."

I have an average Philco tabletop radio, plastic case, nothing fancy... but it can sound really, really good depending on the station.

The AM radios were getting better and better, & then two things happened:

#1 - Transistors allowed for tiny radios which, but design, sounded poor since they were coming out a 2 inch (or less!) speaker. Remember those awful white plastic earplugs? I genuinely don't know how they got that much distortion out of an "earphone!"

#2 - FM came along, which gave classical listeners a nearly silent background and stereo.

As listeners moved to FM for music in the 70s & people depended mostly on AM for news weather and traffic, manufacturers saw no reason to spend the money to produce quality AM... especially after the AM = bad, FM = good mantra had made the rounds.

The more people moved to FM stereo, the less manufacturers had to worry about AM fidelity. Selectivity because people's only complaint as a generation grew up with truly atrocious AM sound. I had a Walkman-type radio that had a listed distortion level on the AM side of 6%!!! People only cared if they could hear the weather reports or sports, and the manufacturers followed the money.

By the time AM stereo came out (and its promise of wide-band receivers), music was nearly gone from AM, and neither sales people nor listeners had a clue.

I argued for several minutes with a sales rep that an AM/FM stereo was not an AM stereo / FM stereo radio. He kept saying, "sure it is! See? Says 'stereo' right here!" :

Friends who I talked to about AM stereo said, "great... tin-can audio in TWO channels now.. why would I want that?"

I'd make them cassettes off my Sony, I'd tune their factory-installed AM stereo car receivers to a stereo music station, I'd drag friends into stores and demo stereo AM for them (if we could get a signal inside a building encased in steel and lit with fluorescent bulbs)... they just didn't (or wouldn't) get it.

By the time I had (a few of) them convinced, they'd say, "O.K... but what on AM justifies me spending that kind of money? All I want to do is listen to the ball game (which is fed on a phone line) or hear what the TV meteorologist has to say (which is also fed via phone line).

Now we have bone-crushing compression on FM similar to what those who originally left AM were running from in the first place. We have rim-shot FMs trying to be a local signal, creating multipath and hiss not unlike the noise we used to get on our favorite AM stations.

There is no good solution to this. If you could offer free upgrades of all of the AM radios in your Arbitron-rated market (which is financially and mechanically impossible) you MIGHT be able to compete with music FMs. MIGHT.

The AMs are going to go for pennies on the dollar, and will be picked up by those looking to do hyper-niche programming. It won't be pretty, but if you can pick up a dark station cheaply enough and super-serve a group that has no alternative on FM, you have a chance of... well, of at least of paying the electric bill.

I foresee a day where AMs are basically audio "billboards" for internet streams.

I also suspect (hope?) that someday the FCC will come to their senses and eliminate IBOC for AM and maybe FM. FM in particular was a solution looking for a problem.. I have yet to find any reports indicating the FIDELITY of FM was a problem for listeners.

Do something totally unique on AM, and you have a chance of winning your audience. However, if you're TOO successful, don't be shocked when an FM duplicates your format and steals your audience.

And if they don't, don't be surprised if you go broke.

I, too feel like (quality) AM sounds "better" and I can't fully justify it. The AM signal feels more like a continuous sound, while FM feels like it "flutters," like I'm listening to "frames" of sound instead of a continual stream of audio.

I got the same feeling when Hi-Fi stereo VCRs came along: massive improvement, but it sounded like "FM," whatever that means.

You'd think CDs would bug me since they're "frames" of sound, but a good CD on a good CD player with a good digital to analog converter on a good amp and speaker setup sound breathtaking to me.

FM reminds me a little of the high frequency distortion in compressed audio files, mp3 and the like. It sounds like a "reconstruction" of the sound rather than like the actual sound, to my ears.

No, I don't like a 10 khz rolloff. No, I don't like high noise floors. When it's clean, though... I like AM better.

 

[TheBigA]

The AMs are going to go for pennies on the dollar, and will be picked up by those looking to do hyper-niche programming. It won't be pretty, but if you can pick up a dark station cheaply enough and super-serve a group that has no alternative on FM, you have a chance of... well, of at least of paying the electric bill.

There are a whole lot easier and cheaper ways to do that now than with an AM station. Even if you got the license for free, the expenses would exceed in the income. You guys really have an exaggerated view of niche formats. If there was money to be made in them, Clear Channel would be doing it instead of donating worthless AMs to charity. "Super-serving a group that has no FM" will only make money if advertisers want to reach them. Good luck on that sales call.

I also suspect (hope?) that someday the FCC will come to their senses and eliminate IBOC for AM and maybe FM.

You really haven't been paying attention these last 25 years, have you? The FCC will NEVER come to their senses, especially with regards to AM/FM, because none of them have a clue what it is.

Do something totally unique on AM, and you have a chance of winning your audience.

The first thing you have to do after you do something "totally unique on AM" is find a way to get people to sample it. Good luck. That's also a problem for FM. Because people don't scan the dial looking for something unique like they did when you were a kid. They know what they like, and they know where to find it. Everything else is spam.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

Because people don't scan the dial looking for something unique like they did when you were a kid. They know what they like, and they know where to find it. Everything else is spam.

Two Priceless quotes!

Those of us who grew up in rural America knew that where ever we went (within our limited world) there would be may 15 stations show up on a scan. Max. I had an unpleasant experience yesterday that cost me two hours of sitting and locked out of my car. On the way home I played the SCAN game with the radio. FM. It never skipped over more than two channels at a time. We used to scan through 8 to 15 signals and then pick the most pleasing. Scan through 75 or so available signals looking for the best? I just turned it off.

SPAM on my radio? Great expression. But like our e-mail boxes, what I look forward to reading in my e-mail might be SPAM to you if it showed up in YOUR e-mail. A classic way of describing much of what shows up on my radio... manually tuned or scanned.

 

[TheBigA]

Scan through 75 or so available signals looking for the best? I just turned it off.

Imagine trying to do that with internet radio. That's why it will never be a real force. People want choice, but not millions of choices. Just let me choose between the red one and the green one.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

Scan through 75 or so available signals looking for the best? I just turned it off.

Imagine trying to do that with internet radio. That's why it will never be a real force. People want choice, but not millions of choices. Just let me choose between the red one and the green one.

Good carpet sales people NEVER bring in a wheelbarrow full of samples. They come to your door on the pretense of making sure they have the right address, they sneak a look at your "current design tastes" and then maybe bring in half a dozen samples at most and they make an efficient sale. Bring in three dozen samples and there may be NO SALE that night!

Here is a possible scenario for streaming audio: Things go viral in social medial today. Only those who have the know-how and resources to create "buzz" within Facebook and other conduits will be able to garner audience to an audio web stream.

Johnny Fuzzytonsils and me working from our little hidden-in-the-attic studio and automation will be lost in that "millions of choices" haystack.

 

[TVradioguru]

The only person in over twenty years to make money with streaming audio is Mark Cuban. Of course that being said, Broadcast.com didn't last long and never made any money through streaming. Mark just make a boatload of cash selling the speculation.

I agree with the premise that streaming audio/radio will be a tough business even without the expense of traditional broadcasting. As Big A pointed out, there is just too many of them for any one to have an impact.

 

[gr8oldies]

If anyone makes money streaming its going to be the big boys who have the promotional dollars. And the most popular channels will be the ones that play the same familiar songs over and over again, while the Death Polka channel struggles.

 

[Tom Wells]

Do you have a link for that Death Polka stream?

 

[GeneSavage]

I agree that it is a long shot to be "discovered" on AM, but there's precious little other value for the signal.

What's be said about internet radio (the battle will be getting on the listeners' radar) is absolutely true for AM radio stations, too.

I doubt that many niche listeners just scan the AM dial every week or so looking for "their" programming... if you have an AM, even if the audience is out there, even if you're not fighting an FM running the same thing, you HAVE to let them know you're there and you MAY have to show them how to get to you!

I currently work at an AM "classic hits" station... not even a blowtorch, making it doubly hard. We tell our listeners not only to tell their friends about us, but to set a button on their friend's car radio for us.

We've talked about offering prizes for callers who will go live on the air with us as they tune their friends' radios to us.

(Truth be told, I see AM and FM BOTH going away over the next 30 years as internet radio in the car gets easier and easier. Why spend the money, sweat and time maintaining a tower and transmitter to cover 90 miles if you're lucky when you can put a computer in the corner of a room and reach the world?

Whatever "directory" or "search" becomes the standard for finding internet streams in the car, that's where an internet station is going to have to be listed. The only comparison today is iTunes; I got my internet station listed there and my numbers went through the ROOF... and yeah, I'm getting ready to start collecting some small checks for streaming ads on my "radio" station.)

 

[Tom Wells]

Just how soon do you expect this internet radio to work reliably in a car?
I don't just mean on a 20 mile drive to work, I mean when can I tune in a station, and drive from Chicago to Paducah KY and not have it drop out over and over again? And when will this sevice be paid for completely by the advertisers, instead of
by the users? I'm not even happy with the service in a stationary mode.
Every webstream I try to listen to drops out repeatedly, and I'm paying for the data connection, AND there are STILL commercials. Then there are the servers which kick listeners off every hour or two. What a treat that is!

Then there's the "user interface". You want me to believe that naviagting through screen after screen is preferable to
turning a single knob?

If I had stop and continually fiddle with the radio to get the signal, I wouldn't be very likely to pay money for
that either. Nor would I be likely to listen for free.

The model of one stream to each listener is very inefficient compared to radio broadcast, where one source can feed an unlimited number of radios.

FM is barely usable on long drives, with such limited coverage areas.

When "search" becomes standard for finding streams, the big media companies will pay to show up first, just as with
any other internet search, and the smaller streams will be listed on page 100, if at all.

 

[12 In a Row]

My 24 year old daughter just bought a brand new car. What was she most excited about? The factory installed MP3 jack, I-pod dock plus satellite free for a year.

 

[carolinaradio]

I'm surprised mp3 players still are as popular as they are when mobile phones can do the same thing.

 

[TheBigA]

I'm surprised mp3 players still are as popular as they are when mobile phones can do the same thing.

Probably part of why iPod sales have slowed down.

 

[KeithE4]

Just how soon do you expect this internet radio to work reliably in a car?

When 4G is universal, not before. That'll be at least another couple of years, or until 5G is rolled out, whichever comes first.

I don't just mean on a 20 mile drive to work, I mean when can I tune in a station, and drive from Chicago to Paducah KY and not have it drop out over and over again? And when will this sevice be paid for completely by the advertisers, instead of by the users?

Probably never. Universal WiMax provided by local gummints or cable companies is dead. LTE is the technology that is being used, and it's pretty much owned by the phone companies. You're going to pay for it.

I'm not even happy with the service in a stationary mode. Every webstream I try to listen to drops out repeatedly, and I'm paying for the data connection, AND there are STILL commercials.

It's still the interwebs, just with a different transmission mode. Plus, UHF is UHF, which is not exactly friendly to mobile transmissions. Even with the old FM cell service, there were dropouts. Requiring a two-way connection doesn't help.

Then there are the servers which kick listeners off every hour or two. What a treat that is!

The server dropout issues are with the providers and are not likely to change. One thing I read in an old CBS/AOL player FAQ said that unless one moves the mouse or presses a key to indicate activity, it will drop out due to some kind of licensing issue, as well as the supposed waste of bandwidth on someone who is "not there." My NFL app for my Droid does the same thing when I stream NFL Network. Every few minutes I get a nag message asking if I'm still there. If I don't answer, I get cut off.

Then there's the "user interface". You want me to believe that naviagting through screen after screen is preferable to turning a single knob?

Blame the stations themselves. They want you to access their streams either via their websites or branded players. Why? They sell ads there. CBS allows access to their streams without their player or site, but not all do.

If I had stop and continually fiddle with the radio to get the signal, I wouldn't be very likely to pay money for that either. Nor would I be likely to listen for free.

It's doable, but only if the stations want to be accessed that way.

The model of one stream to each listener is very inefficient compared to radio broadcast, where one source can feed an unlimited number of radios.

With thousands of stations available and the average person only listening to 10 or 20 of them, a "generic" selector system can't be done. An app would have to be written that would allow one to set whatever stations they want. Personally, I use Linux shell scripts that call mplayer (no GUI - sound only if there is no video) with the desired URL, and the filename being the station call letters. This has to be made easier for the masses but it works for me.

FM is barely usable on long drives, with such limited coverage areas.

That is the only advantage AM has, and then, only when listening to 50 kW blowtorches.

When "search" becomes standard for finding streams, the big media companies will pay to show up first, just as with any other internet search, and the smaller streams will be listed on page 100, if at all.

There's The Stream Center, that also contains a plugin for FIrefox's search engine dropdown box, and a few others, but they still require a web browser.

 

[carolinaradio]

I'm surprised mp3 players still are as popular as they are when mobile phones can do the same thing.

Probably part of why iPod sales have slowed down.

Probably so....when my mp3 broke I just put the songs on my Blackberry. Does the same thing for me.