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KAHM

I

Interstate 78

I recently got a wi-fi radio and it's amazing how much more I find myself listening to internet radio not being tied to a computer. What a great concept. Surprised more people don't have them. One of my favorite stations to listen to has been KAHM out of Prescott, Arizona. Wow, talk about a taste of the past. The station is exactly how a beautiful music station would sound around 1988 playing some old school B/EZ but also plenty of those oh-so-lovable and cheesy instrumental covers of 70s and 80s music. I actually like it a lot more than "Escape" on XM/Sirius which tends to sound more like a beautiful music station from the 50s, 60s, or 70s. KAHM seems to have plenty of sponsors and the commercials crack my wife and I up laughing. Funeral homes. Hospice care. Nursing homes. Cemeteries. They really do live up to the stereotype of this music being for old people, but what counts is that there seems to be PLENTY of those types of ads, so it sounds like the station is still making money. The announcer is quite interesting as well. A lady with a thick British accent who fumbles over the weather forecast and the news, but seems very pleasant and says corny things like "as beautiful as Prescott is as beautiful as our music."

Kudos to KAHM. I LOVE this station. It takes me back to my childhood in the 70s and 80s. Amazing a commercial station like this exists and is not a non-commercial like KLUX, KHOY, and KNCT.
 
KXL in the 1970s and 1980s used to sound like KAHM does to-day, but with more surface noise. I think KAHM's one of the last of its kind, too, unless WBEB should go back to its roots!

My biggest (only?) complaint about the stream is the fidelity, or lack thereof. Too bad they don't have a higher-fidelity (cough*MP4*cough*) stream. I suppose 16000Hz/32k CBR MP3 would sound acceptible over the tinny, undersized speakers the Chinese build in to 802-11 streaming receivers and cell f0nez, but not on earphones.

I guess they must still get a lot of folks listening over dial-up lines or other throughput-starved physical layers.

F.Y.I., if you open up their streaming URL in a browser, http://peace.str3am.com:6730/ (or http://64.202.98.32:6730/ ) you will find a Shoutcast status page, from which you can get a playlist for the past hour or so. It's under "Song History" (../played.html).
 
Oh I agree with you 100%. I didn't mention that because I'm just so pleased with the music, that I don't mind the fidelity. But it really does stink. There's tiny college stations I listen to with better fidelity than KAHM. 32k? It sounds like I'm listening over a phone line. But oh well. I still love the station. I guess that's all they can afford.
 
Well, like I said, they must still get a lot of people (probably older folks) listening over dial-up lines. Especially in an area as sparsely populated as that part of the US, where users might be too far away from the central office to make ADSL lines practical, or even feasible. But even MPEG4/AAC would probably sound several orders of magnitude better at that same bitrate than the current MP3 implementation does.

Needless to say, it works perfectly over my private dial-up line at not much more than 33600 b/sec., provided I'm not up/downloading anything else. ;o)

Do love the programming, though!
 
Interstate 78 said:
KAHM seems to have plenty of sponsors and the commercials crack my wife and I up laughing. Funeral homes. Hospice care. Nursing homes. Cemeteries. They really do live up to the stereotype of this music being for old people, ...
Click to expand...

While KAHM's playlist may be preferred by older listeners there is another good reason you hear those types of ads. Prescott, AZ is largely a retirement city and is surrounded by other retirement areas. Less a stereotype and more of a practical financial target.
 
Interstate 78 said:
Oh I agree with you 100%. I didn't mention that because I'm just so pleased with the music, that I don't mind the fidelity. But it really does stink. There's tiny college stations I listen to with better fidelity than KAHM. 32k? It sounds like I'm listening over a phone line. But oh well. I still love the station. I guess that's all they can afford.
Click to expand...


I had a chance to listen to them over-the air in the fall of 2010 while driving across country to San Diego. I picked them up just outside of Flagstaff, and enjoyed them for at least 3 hours as I drove south on I-17 to Phoenix. Their signal was outstanding, excellent FM Stereo quality and very little fading or multi-path considering the mountainous terrain. They did fade out just as I entered the northern suburbs of Phoenix. But it was nice to enjoy them in a beautiful part of the country. I-17 has to be one of the most scenic interstate highways in the Southwest. I also picked them up heading west out of Phoenix along I-10 for a brief time just east of Quartzsite near the CA/AZ border.
 
This radio station is an anomaly in the modern age of radio. It's a commercial "beautiful music" radio station (the kind I dreaded hearing as a kid of the '70s because it reminded me of the doctors offices my mom visited frequently, which had this music, a perpetual Name-That-Tune soundtrack of few vocals, but mostly pop and jazz standards as performed by lush orchestras and perky trumpets piped into their waiting rooms, wafting through the utilitarian furniture, dog eared National Geographics and potted plants.)

I actually have a soft spot for this music and type of radio now. It's a LOT cheaper than Ambien and does exactly the same thing for me.

Few people in Prescott are younger than 50. STAY OFF THEIR LAWNS.

Having been down that way myself (whilst going to Phoenix), I can tell you one thing about KAHM, for 58,000 watts, they have a MONSTER signal all over northern Arizona. I even picked them up in Lynnwood, WA during a rare tropo opening for about 20 minutes.
 
Wish the tropo would carry it my way! But being on 102.1, the presence of KINK and 272EL's strong upper and lower sidebands pretty much eliminate any possibility of that ever happening....
 
I listen to KAHM on my computer with some regularity and agree it's a rare gem. Also enjoy seeing the beautiful pics of Arizona they show on the screen.

Another commercial EZ station does survive. WHLC-FM 104.5 in another retirement mecca, Highlands-Cashiers, NC. Until a few months ago they were playing similar music to KAHM, but recently they seem to be emphasizing more soft jazz (albeit many of the same jazzy tunes a late-80s EZ station would have been playing, many I haven't heard in a while) and newer/more frequent vocals. Hopefully they're not getting ready to shift to Soft AC.
 
Naah, I've never seen any pictures in VLC/Kaffeine, just the audio stream. (They'd probably clog up my loop anyways, depending on the speed I'm running at.) Are you using the FLash player, by chance?
 
A couple of other commercial stations still doing EZ/BM are WGCY in Gibson City, IL and KWXY-AM in Palm Springs, CA. KWXY is about 50/50 instrumentals to vocals since acquiring the format from the former KWXY-FM a couple of years ago. Both stations stream online.
 
Except those two stations stream using FLash players, and analysis of their HTML code reveals no reasonable way to cruft together a valid direct URL to the stream itself without resorting to using packet sniffing.

As far as I'm concerned, when streamers resort to that sort of crap, they're essentially not even streaming at all, period. An unstream, as Blair/Orwell probably would have put it.
 
I just did a search for WGCY in my TuneIn app, and it came up right away and streamed with no problem. 24k WMA stream, but whatever...it's adequate for listening while trying to fall asleep.... ;D
 
I also enjoy listening to KAHM online. The station is indeed part of a bygone era. It even sounds to me like they may still be using carts and/or reels. Does anyone know if this is the case?

Here's hoping this station will be around for years to come. Unfortunately, though. I think it's fairly safe to assume that, when KAHM is finally put up for sale (as it inevitably will be), the new owners will almost certainly change the format to "something more commercially viable".
 
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