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Jackson Armstrong on KB (1970 Aircheck - Great Quality

Dale Patterson had this show on Rock Radio Scripbook not long ago, but this one has better quality.

One of the YouTube commenters wondered if perhaps it came off the program monitor but I hear some siblants that make me wonder if it's a really good radio dub tuned just slightly off-frequency.

I don't think I've brought this up before...but the audio quality of some of these old AM Top 40 powerhouses is jawdropping! A lot of dynamic range, yet full-sounding and warm, never thin...this audio (and other old 'KB airchecks from this era) sounds very transparent. I remember other stations from back then - WRKO and WABC to name a couple - also as having a lot of perceived dynamics. Of course WABC's reverb was pure magic!

Since the 70's, my ears have gotten used to audio that was compressed to the nines, even on FM (the Upstate NY stations I hear, however, are more open than here in Western PA), but hearing these old airchecks reminds me of what an art it is to make audio sound that good.

Of course there was the matter of only being able to hear 3KhZ of the 15KhZ audio broadcast onto your radio in those days...that's another matter entirely. I had the good fortune to own a 1941 GE console tube set back then and live in a rural area w/o a lot of RF. If you never got to hear AM Top 40 radio on an old wideband tube set, you missed how good the medium could sound.
 
chas108 said:
One of the YouTube commenters wondered if perhaps it came off the program monitor but I hear some siblants that make me wonder if it's a really good radio dub tuned just slightly off-frequency.

I don't think I've brought this up before...but the audio quality of some of these old AM Top 40 powerhouses is jawdropping! A lot of dynamic range, yet full-sounding and warm, never thin...this audio (and other old 'KB airchecks from this era) sounds very transparent. I remember other stations from back then - WRKO and WABC to name a couple - also as having a lot of perceived dynamics. Of course WABC's reverb was pure magic!

Since the 70's, my ears have gotten used to audio that was compressed to the nines, even on FM (the Upstate NY stations I hear, however, are more open than here in Western PA), but hearing these old airchecks reminds me of what an art it is to make audio sound that good.

Of course there was the matter of only being able to hear 3KhZ of the 15KhZ audio broadcast onto your radio in those days...that's another matter entirely. I had the good fortune to own a 1941 GE console tube set back then and live in a rural area w/o a lot of RF. If you never got to hear AM Top 40 radio on an old wideband tube set, you missed how good the medium could sound.
Click to expand...
Yeah, those where the days when even non-DA kilowatt teapots like 1400 WYSL, 1440 WJJL and 1120 WWOL had some good fidelity with strong sidebands.

But as Steely Dan sings it in Pretzel Logic, "Those days are gone forever, over a long time ago... oh yeah."1 And KB?

The Westinghouse was Fid's pride and joy. It sucked up line voltage, but it did sound sweet, even when pushing RF through that big ol' phasor and forcing audio through those ATU's that filtered out 550 on WGR's shared night tower.

As much as some of us venerate the Big Tree site for its technological capacity, more than one 'KB-'GR CE has offered that the site was an RF and audio pain in the ass. It took a dedicated engineer who knew and loved AM directionals to coddle that site. Imagine if KB and GR had separate sites and if GR had at least a daytime antenna that radiated a proper wavelength.

Repeat1

KB really didn't "crush" its audio until the mid 70s when it seemed every Top 40 station went Dorrough Tri-Band or some other type of home brew discriminating audio processing. CKLW always sounded clean, full bandwidth and loud, and as I understand it, it was driven by a custom made processor that its CE contrived. But KB, when Armstrong was cookin' with plutonium, was just Audimax-Volumax with a Kahn Symetra-Peak between the board and the Audimax. And probably more than a few UTC audio transformers, always a delight for audio phase shift. Can you imagine what the KB Westinghouse would have done with consistent 90-100% modulation on positive peaks and (cough) 125 on negatives?

As I hear it, the Armstrong aircheck in Yugoidar's link sounds like board out to reel to reel in. I could be very wrong, but I say this upon hearing the inconsistent levels. Listen to Jack's cold read on AM&A's and the disparity on his talkover on the hokey "Now Radio" jingles, which BTW, he hated and often mocked, to the delight of young radio geeks and wannabees like me who got the inside joke. Jeff Kaye once offered that Armstrong would badger Jeff and Dick Arcara for new jingles every other day, which eventually brought about the memorable and outstanding WKBW The Music People custom package that IIRC, debuted in early to mid '71. (Ugh... 40 years past.) BTW, hearing the SOWNY podcast with Jack and Berns was informative as DB relates he and Armstrong started at KB on the same day.

Listening to the Armstrong aircheck was bittersweet because Armstrong passed so young. I was an unabashed fan, having first heard him as Big Jack in the 60s on 1100 WKYC Cleveland, re-discovering him years later on 1050 CHUM. When the KB promos for him began, I actually wrote Jeff an "it's about time" letter (to which he responded, "You ain't heard nothin' yet, kid. Tell your friends.") And I did. "Wait'll you hear this guy..."

Repeat1

OK, so this another 50+ post about KB that will probably honk somebody off. Hey, it's what I am and I'm damn comfortable with it. But if it's any consolation, I was listening to DJ Anthony on Kiss the other day and thought he sounded pretty damn good too. He too may someday be known as one of the Buffalo legends.
 
Jim, I've heard some, not a lot..but some of DJ Anthony and agree with you. 'KSE is - has usually been - just a hair too rhythmic for my tastes...but what goes on between the songs is usually solid. (Remember my context is the 3-4x/year drive thru). And the processing, as mentioned above, is pretty transparent, especially when compared to Pittsburgh and other huge markets.

'YRK gets the most improved award...20 years ago in the Ken Johnson era it sounded like old phonograph records. Flat, scratchy, really bad IMHO. I don't remember if Justin Case fixed that when he did his short tour of duty or if it happened before his arrival (January 1998) but they've sounded pretty good ever since. My wife heard the change first...she came home from a drive to see her folks and noted "'YRK sounded a lot better"...again, like Kiss...when I listen I usually get engaged with good jock content.

Your comments about when 'KB began crushing the audio validate my recollections...the first station where I really noticed that compressed sound was WRCQ/Hartford, Fall '73...I don't remember why I was driving down there but I remember being on an exit ramp and hearing Cher's "Half-Breed"...it sounded larger than life. It must have been after that when 'KB began the practice.

As for the Armstrong aircheck, his mocking of the "Now Radio" package (and yes I noticed those disparities in the audio as well as one later where he comes in late over the fade) reminds me of another bit he did when a new hire was preparing his first overnight shift. I don't recall who it was...but Jack promoted him with a gag about preparing "his ad-libs" for hours...and he got a hold of a few and began to read them..."And the hits...just...keep on' comin'...how original..here's another one...the beat goes on...yep, it must've taken him hours to come up with those winners!" I thought of my local hometown station in Brattleboro, VT, still using both those phrases extensively, and thought how uncool they are. Knowing what I know now, I'm sure if Jeff Kaye heard it he had a cow over the "inside" content. I dunno if I was that tuned into the business then that I understood the bit, I was just 15 and hadn't yet gotten my first job in the business...or if Armstrong was simply that good a storyteller that he could take "inside" content and boil it down for mass consumption.

Probably both.

I think 13Q/Pittsburgh was one of the pioneers of that tightly compressed sound. In contrast, I don't recall WABC or WNBC jumping into the processing wars to that extent. KDKA never followed suit until much later. I'll always remember hearing "Bohemian Rhaspody" on KDKA and being shocked and the nuance and dynamic...two qualities not in 13Q's technical vocabulary. And although I do remember 'KB getting more aggressive with its processing, I don't recall it as being beat to death as 13Q's.

I'll be listening with interest today as I drive thru on the 90 headed for Syracuse and later to Albany for a family wedding. It'll just be Janet and me and we're in no hurry...maybe we'll drive into Canada for a couple hours - or perhaps get off at Orchard Park (is it that exit or Hamburg?) and head over to Big Tree Road to get some shots of the 'KB/'GR tower site.
 
This may seem like a stretch, but I was talking about Jack with our friend Larry White and our conversation took us to Keener 13 Detroit, Gary Stevens and by extension WMCA and WABC, New York as we discussed the differences between the two stations. This brought up B. Mitchel Reed in relation to Armstrong. BMR, one of the fastest mouths on radio, was one of the WMCA New York "Good Guys." This lead me to the WMCA page at http://www.musicradio77.com/wmca/wmcaairchecs.html (select audio file under B. Mitchel Reed) where I listened to a BMR aircheck. And what does the aircheck reveal? A connection to Buffalo, of course. At 4:16 in, BMR backsells "Walkin' The Dog" and does a brief, spot on immitation of The Hound, the night time trend setter who was heard all over the east coast when he did nights on KB. Six degrees on separation? Try three.
 
"As much as some of us venerate the Big Tree site for its technological capacity, more than one 'KB-'GR CE has offered that the site was an RF and audio pain in the ass. It took a dedicated engineer who knew and loved AM directionals to coddle that site. Imagine if KB and GR had separate sites and if GR had at least a daytime antenna that radiated a proper wavelength."

Were you talking with Pete Burk, who was KB's CE in the late 70s?

I remember a conversation with him while I was on the news staff there, where he said keeping KB sounding good and crisp, at a time when it was beginning to worry just a little about the possibility of FM competition (this was 1977) was giving him headaches. The RF fields around Big Tree were crazy--they were strong enough to make fluorescent bulbs glow even if you didn't plug them in. KB had put a Dorrough three-band audio processor in the audio chain, and while they had retired the Westinghouse 50 kW rig by then (it was still in place along the back wall but hadn't been fired up in a while), they were actually being conservative in pushing its replacement too hard (IIRC it was one of the first MW-50s but I could be wrong). You could get away with pushing peak positive modulation to 125% under then-recent FCC rules changes without getting the dreaded Notice of Apparent Liability, but he thought it sounded bad if you went beyond 115, so he wouldn't.

Dave May at WBEN swore by the then-new multi-band Orban Optimod, and he was right (it made WBEN sound crisper and cleaner than it ever had before) but he also wouldn't push our 5 KW Collins units (I think we had matching 820Es) beyond 110% positive peaks.

As for Armstrong, he would have made an audio chain of soup cans tied together with string sound entertaining. We can't get Kiss 98.5 here in Rochester but it's nice to know some of their current talent stands up well against the personalities we grew up with--there's hope for this business yet.
 
Correction: Bob's post pointed to an error in my original post regarding modulating the KB Westinghouse. I originally wrote "Can you imagine what the KB Westinghouse would have done with consistent 90-100% modulation on positive peaks and (cough) 125 on negatives?"

I should have written 90-100% on negative peaks and 125% on positive. Apologies for the BF. I know better. The FCC rules state "...100% max negative, 125% max positive..." Technically speaking, modulation exceeding 100% on negative peaks shuts off the carrier.
 
JimPastrick said:
At 4:16 in, BMR backsells "Walkin' The Dog" and does a brief, spot on immitation of The Hound, the night time trend setter who was heard all over the east coast when he did nights on KB. Six degrees on separation? Try three.
Click to expand...

Having been born in 1957, I missed the initial era of Rock & Roll radio personalities entirely.

It was really an acquired taste. I'd listen to airchecks of George Lorenz or his Pittsburgh equivalent Porky Chedwick (still alive and well at 93!) and wonder...what...is...this?!

Then my oldest son gave me a copy of a college-level textbook called Rockin' Out by Reebee Garofalo. One of the subjects covered by this exhaustive history of pop music was the initial rise of disc jockeys in the mid-1930's...and how they had own individual jive. Now I have context and can appreciate the role this initial generation of air talent played in the rise of Rock & Roll, the passion they exuded for the music and the culture growing up around it.

I'd never heard B. Mitchel Reed before but like Dan Ingram, I enjoy the way he injected his personality into formatic elements from live spots to time checks. He kept things moving and gave the listener of that day the information and entertainment they wanted.

Driving up the Thruway on Thursday we happened upon one PM driver whose first set was a quiet intro of the current Rascal Flatts tune "I Won't Let Go". Only :05, but there was some fade over the previous record...:15-:20, enough to say hello, or something about our perpetual rainy season...or anything topical to let me know you're alive and excited to entertain me and everyone else tuning in at that moment.

Instead a brief generic intro. My wife remarked..."is she voicetracked?"

It was a good half hour before it became clear that this person was live and had a pulse...and actually a nice personality.

Thanks for sharing that aircheck Jim...like Bob noted there's still hope for this business but we can't entirely throw away the past. There are mechanicals from the past that today's air talent can learn from and make their own.
 
Wow. That was incredible!

Just got some time to listen.

THANK YOU for sharing!!!
 
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