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KPOP 93.5 FM Sacramento/Roseville CA 1984

Y2kTheNewOldies

Y2kTheNewOldies


Before KPOP became associated with Korean Pop they were call letters for the now KYRV-FM in Sacramento.

Note the KPOP Call Letters are currently used for a station in Hartshorne, Oklahoma as of 2025. Previously these call letters were used for stations in Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego at some point in their history. At the time of the clip when the calls were used in Sacramento it was used for what became the alternative format.
en.wikipedia.org

KYRV - Wikipedia

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KPOP (FM) - Wikipedia

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en.wikipedia.org

KLSD - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

en.wikipedia.org

KTNQ - Wikipedia

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Thanks for starting this thread, I had an older one about this station but it was closed due to inactivity. I posted the aircheck which someone had sent to me in the Airchecks board but didn’t want to annoy anyone and also post it here.

Read the YouTube description for my commentary, short version is that it HUGELY influenced my music taste despite lasting only 5 months. 41 years later I still begrudge the people who killed it so soon (one of them had posted about it here a few years ago but shows as no longer active.)

Would love to find ANY other surviving material from KPOP from August 1983 through January 1984. Any other off-air recordings, publicity they might’ve gotten back then, station IDs or commercials that might have had copies kept, anything at all. If I had the talent I’d make a documentary about this station, but I can at least try to preserve everything that’s left of it. It is pretty hard to research nowadays because of the term being used for Korean pop music.
 
Note that KYRV is on 93.7, not 93.5. When it was KDJQ with the 93 Rock format (which was at least better than the crappy top 40 they were before, and has since moved to 98.5 in a frequency swap a few years back) they moved to that frequency in order to have a stronger signal. It’s generally been my experience that the better a station is, the worse their signal is and vice versa. After that move, I was able to get KKBN on 93.5 in Twaine Harte, which was the only FM station I know of that carried the Larry King show.
 
Originally KPOP was an AM station at 1110 assigned to Roseville, CA. 93.5 was KPIP-FM a Spanish language station. Actually Sacramentos first Spanish language station owned by the same owners as KPOP 1110 AM.
 
Y2kTheNewOldies said:
en.wikipedia.org

KTNQ - Wikipedia

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That is a good example of very bad Wikipedia information.

It’s misees several stages of KTNQ’s operation, including its purchase by the Liberman brothers and then its sale to Cecil Heftel. And in 1996 it became all Spanish language talk, frequently beating KFI in the important sales demos. There is a lot more missing here, invcluding the whole “format of the day” from 2001 to 2012.
 
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One of my memories of 1110 KPOP was from about 1970. They had a rhythm and blues show in the evening with H.B Bailey as the dj. The signal faded somewhat in Sacramento, but I liked his urban style delivery.
 
davideduardo said:
That is a good example of very bad Wikipedia information.

It’s misees several stages of KTNQ’s operation, including its purchase by the Lieberman brothers and then its sale to Cecil Heftel. And in 1996 it became all Spanish language talk, frequently beating KFI in the important sales demos. There is a lot more missing here, invcluding the whole “format of the day” from 2001 to 2012.
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I have a DVD of Grand Theft Auto movie from '76 that featured Ten-Q through-out the movie. I do remember picking up the station late at night when it was top-40.
 
K.M. Richards said:
Hey, could I ask to hear more about 93.5 when it was KPOP, instead of what's missing from the KTNQ Wikipedia page and the movie Ten-Q was featured in?
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I know...David and me nearly derailed the train. The bad Wikipedia information thing probably belongs in a separate thread somewhere. As for KPOP, I wonder if they changed frequencies way back when would've helped them. Sad the Modern Rock lasted just a few months when San Francisco's KQAK lasted a few years.
 
As I said, the better a station’s content was, the worse their signal was and vice versa. KPOP did take a bit more effort to get in and was worth it for a unique format, but then they tried to copy KSFM which has always had an unbeatable signal.

KQAK of course took even more effort to get in Sacramento, but I don’t ever remember a time when it didn’t come in at all. (There’s now a local low-power station on that same frequency so you can’t get its current incarnation KSOL now.) KITS was nearly impossible, sandwiched between 2 stations on adjacent frequencies. (Haven’t even tried to pick that up recently since it’s so bad now, would’ve been a godsend to have internet radio in the 80s.)
 
Cable tv subscribers in the late 80's or early 90's could use a splitter on your co ax cable input and run it to your fm receiver and get certain SF fm channels. I think KMEL was one of the offerings.
 
I think my dad has one I can borrow, and I would seriously buy one just to hear any KPOP tapes (or just about any station from the 70s). I have nearly every video and audio format past to present but have never had any open-reel formats for some reason, time to fix that.
 
jhimbo said:
Cable tv subscribers in the late 80's or early 90's could use a splitter on your co ax cable input and run it to your fm receiver and get certain SF fm channels. I think KMEL was one of the offerings.
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Yup I think that was available service either through Jones Intercable or AT&T broadband(possibly even early Comcast) systems. The available fm frequencies were a mix of Sacramento and Bay Area stations too. For example in Roseville you could listen to KDVS (more reliably then the stations own broadcast signal at the time) or potentially KMEL as you stated.
 
jhimbo said:
Cable tv subscribers in the late 80's or early 90's could use a splitter on your co ax cable input and run it to your fm receiver and get certain SF fm channels. I think KMEL was one of the offerings.
Click to expand...

crucialcolin said:
Yup I think that was available service either through Jones Intercable or AT&T broadband(possibly even early Comcast) systems. The available fm frequencies were a mix of Sacramento and Bay Area stations too. For example in Roseville you could listen to KDVS (more reliably then the stations own broadcast signal at the time) or potentially KMEL as you stated.
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Having been in cable television in the 1970s (working at the local origination channel for one of the oldest cable companies in the business at that time), I can answer the implied question about station selection and signal strength.

Broadband FM on cable wasn't yet something that was technically feasible (it was subject to fading and interference), so cable systems cherry picked from the stations receivable at the system head end and then put them on the cable spaced about two FM channels apart (i.e., 92.1, 92.7, and so on) by separate FM modulators, just as they had a modulator for every television signal they carried.

The average cable system offering FM therefore would carry somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 stations, presuming they could clearly receive that many at the headend.
 
NoWayNoCC said:
This actually isn't that bad, compared to the garbage that gets broadcast today.
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Well, that’s a pretty low bar. There are top 40 songs from that era that I hated then but sound like Beethoven compared to some of the stuff that passes for music now. I know “The Wonder Rabbit” was from KROY’s top 40 days, but to have this replace Rock of the 80s was insulting. Nothing new or different about any of those songs, they sure as hell weren’t getting any imports and playing songs first that would be hits elsewhere later. He just sounds so phony also, but that was what the station wanted then- Carmy Ferrari (the DJ on the “good format” recording) stayed on and suddenly sounded like that also, as if he’d been given a lobotomy. They sounded a lot more honest and genuine before, station jingles were just cheesy also.

He mentions them getting the “station of the year” award from the local paper, I hadn’t heard about that then but they would’ve gotten an earful from me if I had known. There were already 2 other stations then doing top 40 plus others from out of the area. At least within a year of that recording they’d change to 93 Rock, which still wasn’t as special as Rock of the 80s but at least a more respectable format that catered to real fans of the music rather than those who had to be told what was “hot”.
 


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