KING 1090 in Seattle ran the Kahn ISB system for a few months. Just like most AM stereo systems, it sounded unique, but just not comparable with FM stereo.
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Mr Haney says he wants to get in on this new fangled stuff called IBOC
- Thread starter KB1OKL
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KING 1090 in Seattle ran the Kahn ISB system for a few months. Just like most AM stereo systems, it sounded unique, but just not comparable with FM stereo.
I used to do that with WLS 890 using two boomboxes and got pretty much the same results with regards to sound quality.
It still was cool to hear stereo on AM even if this was a crude way to experience it.
I never saw quad as being anything except a gimmick. In many markets, there was no quad at all, and even where it was presented, it was a late night show... there just was not enough good recorded product.
AM stereo was to debut when AM still had half the audience shares and cumed nearly 80% of all listeners... who used both bands. Leonard Kahn set that back 5 years, so it was a failure before it started.
It took years for FM stereo to be adopted. Until there were enough receivers that had both stereo capability and that newfangled FM AFC, there was not much market.
In fact, it took two years just to get the first 100 stereo FMs on the air. By 1965 or so, there were enough stations and available receivers to reach critical mass. A lot depended on content, and in some markets FM grew on its own without the need for a government mandated non-duplication rule.
Spain had Top 40 on FM only by 1966... Los Cuarenta Principales. Ecuador had an FM in Quito that was #2 only beaten by its sister AM station. Neither was made successful by a government mandate.
There were roughly fifty to sixty artists that released albums in the 70's that were supposedly Quadraphonic. The vast majority of the albums were actually re-mixed from stereo, not recorded and engineered in true 4-4. One album that didn't make many lists, was Steve Miller-Fly Like an Eagle. It was recorded in one of the few recording studios with a console designed to mix Quad; Kaye/Smith in Seattle. The console was a custom built by API. Before the console was decommissioned, I had the honor of being able to load up the master tape from Fly Like an Eagle, and play it through the board one last time in Quad. I believe Koss came out with Quad headphones with two transducers in each ear. Those actually worked pretty well.
The industry found that Audiophiles who sat in their living room listening to an expensive quad system, were few and far between. Sort of like DX'ers in percentage. Most consumers were content to hearing music from a single speaker centered in their dash, which made up most of the 'mobile listening'.
Content is always King, that rule never changes. What consumers discovered, was they could hear their favorite artists and music with much better clarity and even stereo, than noisy, bandwidth-limited AM. FM became the cool place to listen, mainly because there were few commercials along with better clarity.
I remember listening to a Memphis station in the late '70s that was all-quad and even took the call letters WQUD. The format was sleepy MOR, as I recall, so it didn't play the Miller album. (And no, I didn't buy the hardware needed to listen in quadraphonic, just used the two speakers on the home stereo.)
They had more success selling surround sound and similar audio systems in the 90s. OTOH I can't imagine anyone buying Dolby ATMOS for their home.
Can't remember what year, but I attended one of the Ibquity/HD Alliance demos of Quad broadcasting using their HD radio system at NAB. The majority of the attendees around me were hearkening-back to the attempted Quad days in the late 70's, early 80's. As with other's, I found myself feeling the same way as in those early days; what consumers and receiver manufacturers will care, and where will the content come from?
Following that, there was talk of utilizing the Dolby 5.1 encoding scheme, since there is a lot of movies and music scores mixed for 5.1. The answer still came back to: Listeners aren't going to be content with listening to movie music, and what vehicle manufacturers will produce cars or SUV's with proper 5.1 speaker placement, let alone a center channel? The answer from Ubquity was, that they weren't interested in partnering with Dolby.
Deutschland lost its best long and medium wave frequencies after the war and became an early adopter of FM but they are a special case.
In the 80's and early 90's what was at that time WGSF 1210 in Memphis had AM stereo during the times they were oldies and then CCM, but I'm not sure what system they had. I never had a radio where I could get it in stereo at home or in my car though.
I was amazed when I first heard AM stereo. Various of our farm pickups (Dodges) and other vehicles received AM stereo in roughly the second half of the '80s and at least a bit into the '90s. The only station I heard it on was KONA's AM transmission. It was really neat to hear stereo on AM. It was so new and strange to me. I had no idea there even was such a thing. I suppose it was probably CQUAM?
Yes by that time, Kahn ISB was gone. Motorola QUAM was the last system standing, for the few remaining stations still running AM stereo.
My 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee had one of those Chrysler AM-FM-CD AM stereo-capable radios. I don't think I recall ever hearing another AM stereo station on that radio. There were some distant stations coming in at night that the radio would think are stereo, because the heterodyne would make the radio think there was a 25hz pilot tone. Funny thing was, the stereo effect from the receiver switching to stereo created a widened image of a mono station. Kind of reminded me of the old Orban Stereo Synthesizer, where certain frequency ranges of a mono input would be separated into the left and right channels.
I don't know if the radio you had was the RAZ model, but from what I could find out they were supposed to have AM stereo. I had that model in a 2002 Chrysler PT Cruiser and a 2005 Dodge Caravan, but by that time the AM stereo feature had been taken out, and by that time there were no AM stereo stations left in my area anyway.
Not exactly about HD radio, but I just read this sentence about DAB in a two-year-old article I came across:
"The EU has approved the new European Electronic Communications Code, requiring all new car radios in the EU to be capable of receiving digital terrestrial radio.
Italy and France already have similar receiver legislation in place. The Italian law comes into effect in 2020."
"The EU has approved the new European Electronic Communications Code, requiring all new car radios in the EU to be capable of receiving digital terrestrial radio.
Italy and France already have similar receiver legislation in place. The Italian law comes into effect in 2020."
FYI our government tends to ignore what the EU does. For example, their health care is very different from ours.
We know!
You mean, "For example, they have health care".
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I got my 1st AM stereo receiver in my 94 Ford Explorer and 1520 WWKB Buffalo was still in stereo playing music and it was like wow what a difference! Now AM IBOC is mostly gone and again when I heard that for the 1st time that was even better because there was no background noise and in stereo. That was on WHAM 1180 Rochester. I get why AM HD is such a problem at night because of the sidebands. Can’t wait to hear MA3 mode. For FM HD I wish more stations would turn it back on because it reduces FM analog noise from multipath and I like the extra music/AM radio programming it can provide on HD2/HD3. People just need to be educated about it by the dealer when they are buying a new car with HD. Promoting also helps instead of pushing those stupid smart speakers that I refuse to allow in my house. Yes I own multiple HD radios and use them! I also can listen to Canada stations in HD too!
Commercial HD 2's & 3's usually sound better than 1's because the station engineers don't pump up the compression to match the analog.
I enjoy hearing slightly noisy public stations switching into HD and their unprocessed audio and zero noise floors jump out at me.
Yes they have make HD1 match the analog unfortunately, because it gets annoying if the radio switches back and forth and the audio level changes.
I would think that broadcasters would want to push more HD radios as mandatory so in the future FM could go all digital. Save on power and stations could multicast all their sister stations like many of the TV stations are doing now. They could shut down some of their analog FM locations and save big money. Full digital FM can have up to 8 subchannels. But again, not enough radios. Pipe dream I guess. Turning off the HD only makes people need it less and care even less. No Cumulus stations in Buffalo use it anymore “to save costs” because not enough radios.
When you have lots of choices, users don't really need or care about any one thing. There are those who say listeners don't need or care about FM either.
I don't think there ever was a time when any quantifiable number of people needed or cared about HD. In practical terms, it exists to act as a source for translators.
The main reason most of the original HD-AM stations stopped broadcasting in IBOC, is the original HD-transmission gear (exciters/encoders) died, no longer supported by the manufacturers. Once station's ran out of spares, if was deemed not worth the effort.
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