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KEES Gladewater/Longview

G

gbranch

The audio on KEES 1430 has been terrible since Ike. The station was off the air for several days after Ike, I assumed because of a power outage. However, since it came back on, the audio level is very low, and there is a noticable hiss in the background.

KEES is often off the air for days at a time. Does the station use a lot of old and unreliable equipment? I never hear the same type of problems from the Tyler stations, KTBB or KDOK (don't know about KYZS).
 
KEES is running a brand new BE transmitter. I believe it has an Optimod 9100 for audio. That should sound decent. But once they took the tubes out of the AM transmitters the fidelity went into the trash can.
 
136kgb said:
KEES is running a brand new BE transmitter. I believe it has an Optimod 9100 for audio. That should sound decent. But once they took the tubes out of the AM transmitters the fidelity went into the trash can.
Click to expand...

There are AM stations that have all SS transmitters and sound great.. KSKY is a good example though I don't care for their programming.

KEES should sound good, but may be the quality of their audio feed from Tyler. They have no way to tell if they are off the air or if the transmitter is malfunctioning unless someone from Longview calls them.

And another station that I think still has audio problems is KFRO-AM. The audio is a little lower than other local stations and way too compressed... are these stations still using EQ'd phonelines or an STL?
 
KEES has either been completely off the air or has had no audio for the past 3 days. I think that Gleiser does a great job with KTBB and KDOK, but KEES seems to be treated as a stepchild.

I agree that the audio on 1370 KFRO, as well as 1240 KBGE sounds awful. Both seem really "punchy", I am assuming that is the compression doing that.
 
Greg Branch said:
KEES has either been completely off the air or has had no audio for the past 3 days. I think that Gleiser does a great job with KTBB and KDOK, but KEES seems to be treated as a stepchild.

I agree that the audio on 1370 KFRO, as well as 1240 KBGE sounds awful. Both seem really "punchy", I am assuming that is the compression doing that.
Click to expand...

They just don't give a damn about these stations to upgrade the processing or even check if they are on the air. Or their engineer is miles away in San Antonio-Houston-Dallas and have to wait until he drives over here to fix it. They think only a few old people are listening to AM so why bother upgrading. There are many modern budget processors that sound better than the vintage junk they are using. If 1370 and 1240 were FM stations those processors would be out of there decades ago.

Both KFRO and KBGE are using old single band limiters. They clip hard and punch "holes" in the audio. KWRD uses a (classic) Optimod 9000 AM that has a multi-band limiter that splits the audio into 6 different bands according to EQ and limits/compresses each one.

KFRO used to sound great in the late 80's - early 90's in AM stereo, but Waller let 1370 go to hell when things broke and never fixed or upgraded anything. It used to have a strong night signal that would cover Kilgore and Gladewater at night, but it barely gets there now.
 
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