this is especially noteworthy since Z88.3 was ALWAYS in the top 3 if not #1 and i think this was before they got a signal upgrade. it was, as i recall good in orlando but not great outside the immediate urban orlando area
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Interesting column about AM radio. "Bad programming ruining AM, not audio quality".
- Thread starter mikecroaro
- Start date
this is especially noteworthy since Z88.3 was ALWAYS in the top 3 if not #1 and i think this was before they got a signal upgrade. it was, as i recall good in orlando but not great outside the immediate urban orlando area
Dallas and Ft. Worth were combined by ARB starting with the Fall 1973 book.
Considering that my guess would be only 570, 820 and 1080 cover the whole metroplex on AM, that had to be a death sentence for stations like KXOL and KFJZ in Ft Worth and KBOX and even KLIF in Dallas. All were top 5 in the 1960s and early 70s in their individual markets.
I'm a Dakota native who moved away many years ago. But I still go back to visit my family. I can tell you that most of the state is flat, and cell providers manage to cover everywhere I've been, even areas that are VERY rural. Like Gettysburg (where my cousins live). It's a suburb of Redfield.
Dave B.
Are you aware of any others who are refusing to encode for that reason? (Is there a list somewhere the public can see?)
If there is a list, it would be a radio nerd collated list.
Well, they're not wrong.
At a certain LA station we did some tests of having both staff and listener listen while we turned encoding off and on randomly. Nobody got close to a 50% of the instances right, and most of the times when people "detected" activation on and off were not actual points of change.
most stations I've heard using it it has been so painfully obvious..... WMJI in Cleveland was one when I lived in NW PA. I've heard it on others.. its a very metallic, digital like ringing. if more then half the people failed the test more than half the times, it means you didn't have it cranked up to eleventy billion
The music was dense enough and the talk segments short enough that we did not push the encoding. Among all of the top 15 stations, we had the longest TSL
One of the dangers of making pronouncements like this on the basis of extremely limited real-world experience is that sometimes you don't have any way of knowing when things have changed.
Most (not all, but most) stations in PPM markets no longer use the first-generation Voltair boxes like the one you heard a long time ago on WMJI.
While you were up in Alaska and even now when you're not in a PPM market and haven't been in one for years, technology moved on considerably. First, the addition of the TVC-15 real-time PPM monitor hardware at a lot of stations allowed the encoding to become a lot less obvious, and then the processing manufacturers (mostly Omnia) figured out how to do PPM encoding within their processors, which made it a LOT less obvious.
I still hear some outliers when I travel, but that really harsh metallic flanging stuff you heard years ago is largely a thing of the past. Modern encoding is much friendlier to the ears, especially on FM. To the extent it's still harsh on AM, that's because station owners aren't investing in better processing for a lot of those signals.
But the underlying technology has improved dramatically and your anecdotal experience really doesn't apply to what's happening in the industry today.
KFBK must have still had it cranked as little as 6 months ago, I could tell they ran with Voltair cranked to Fnord! levels
I think what you were hearing was a PPM encoder with a Voltair in line. You can crank up and down the PPM enhancement effect and it does become noticeable. The new Nielsen Encoder and processors that encode do not have an encoding level adjustment and the PPM encoding is not noticeable.
RKO brass decided FM would never succeed in San Francisco because of the terrain, so they sold 106.1 to Century. A new staff and callsign change to KMEL showed everyone what a well run FM could do in the market.
And let's not forget 103.7 which ABC got a power reduction to save on the electric bill. That station became grandfathered under the new power but did fine as KKSF.
Both stories were told to me by engineers who were there.
Well duh. Same position TV is now in as well
A few points in response. It is sometimes possible to get a fairly clear signal in some terrain-blocked places if you have a powerful receiver with a powerful antenna that you place in "the right location."
Also, sometimes people are willing to listen through the fuzz if there is something they really want to hear. I remember attending a relative's wedding in 1977 back at my grandmother's house just east of the border between Sunland and Tujunga, California, where there is a lot of terrain blocking of FM signals. A stereo was set up in the back yard with the radio on and the tuner set to KIQQ at 100.3 mHz. (The station's transmitter at that time was on Mulholland Drive.) Though the sound was somewhat fuzzy, the volume was low enough and the guests were busy doing other things that nobody seemed to notice, except perhaps for yours truly who was only 14 years old at the time.
The other thing I would point out is that the terrain blocking was not the same for all of the San Francisco commercial stations. Those stations whose transmitters were located on Mt. Beacon in Sausalito had no problems penetrating the Richmond district while the stations whose transmitters were located either on San Bruno Mountain, Radio Peak or on the Sutro tower definitely had problems reaching that district.
That's because FM broadcast signals behave similarly to the high-pitched whines old cathode ray tube televisions once produced. By which I mean that those whines were thoroughly audible regardless of your position when you were in the same room as the set. But if you walked several rooms away, you could only hear the whine if your head happened to be in the path of any of the highly directional reflections of the whine that were bouncing throughout the house.
This characteristic of FM is relevant to stations like classic KMEL because there was still tons of stationary FM listening in KMEL's glory days. People would move portable radios to different locations in their rooms, or adjust the 300 ohm FM dipole antennas attached to their home stereo systems, to get consistently clear (or consistently mostly clear) signals from desirable stations. Today, with most listening now done in cars, fringe reception areas can't hold the same audience totals that home listening once could, because when you're in motion, you're constantly assaulted by rapidly and dramatically variable noise levels -- things like multipath and picket fencing.
Was this with a modern eCBET encoder, with no Voltair enhancement processing of any form inline?
This is not my experience. I keep trying to reconcile the positions of folks like yourself and David on modern-day eCBET being inaudible with what my own ears (and others') continue hearing, because, honestly, on almost every station in Los Angeles today, I'm still hearing this stuff very clearly, to a degree that makes listening punishing. Yet, judging from your words here, the sound in question should've been banished to the sticks by now, with top markets like Los Angeles having been scrubbed virtually free of it long ago. These two realities just cannot coexist. So as of late, I've begun wondering if the explanation might be that many stations, off the record, simply never stopped running their Voltair boxes even after installing eCBET encoders (or after upgrading to eCBET-enabled audio processors). Check out these two articles I found:
25-Seven Study: Voltair Still Effective With eCBET
Testing used stations in large or medium markets
www.radioworld.com
Both articles are a decade old, and each claims that Voltair will still improve your ratings with eCBET -- by between 8% and 10% in the second article's case. If boosts that significant were possible then, and if they're still possible today in the current TVC-15, audio processor-integrated eCBET environment you're describing, then what are the odds many stations never decommissioned their Voltairs?
Listen to this brief collage of clips I made off-air from eight Los Angeles stations on August 28, 2024 for another Radio Discussions thread:
https://files.catbox.moe/5junzv.flac
In order, you are hearing KYSR, KPWR, KNX-FM, KOST, KCBS, KLOS, KRTH, and KUSC. Only KPWR and KUSC sound clean to my ears. All of the others sound terrible, with KYSR and KNX-FM being the worst. Today, in 2026, when I scan around the FM dial, everything basically sounds the same to me.
So what could we be hearing here? Is this a sign of Voltair remaining in service as a "secret weapon?" Or is this just the current state of what the industry calls "inaudible?"
Incidentally, here is a 30 minute non-transcoded aircheck I made from KLOS' internet stream during its Yacht Rock weekend last September. The first cut in particular -- Roseanna -- is so audibly affected by the watermarking [enhancement] that the entire song sounds discordant and inharmonic to my ears -- like an old western saloon piano was used in the recording session by Toto. The watermarking is audible to me throughout the entire aircheck, but the way it interacts with certain instruments and/or to certain songs can be absolutely stunning at times, even in modern times.
As long as it's collated.
Back to the subject: Let's invest our hard-earned dollars in radio stations, AM stations as well. Now, lets talk what we want to put on those stations. As investors and business owners what is that. Oh, I got it, let's intentionally put bad programming on the AM stations! Yes, that's the key to succeess: bad programming. Don't you agree?
Now, let's return to reality. The art of radio is giving listeners what they want in a way that allows the company to produce a profit. Ain't the real world great?
Now, let's return to reality. The art of radio is giving listeners what they want in a way that allows the company to produce a profit. Ain't the real world great?
This was in the first month or two of the introduction of PPM to the LA market using the Arbitron encoder and well before Voltaire was introduced. My point is that only at those stations where PPM encoding enhancements or employed was there any audible effect to the average listener. In fact, we did the same test at a Houston station during the trial period before the official rollout.
Both of those self serving tests by the marketers of Voltair were for talk or mostly talk stations and both had them “turned up to 11”25-Seven Study: Voltair Still Effective With eCBET
Testing used stations in large or medium markets