KFI was one of the few clear channel stations that could be picked up nearly all the way to the Atlantic. I recall DX'ers indicating they could get it in West Virginia on certain nights. For that feat alone, plus Vin Scully and the Dodgers in their '60s hey day, KFI needs to be included.
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Mt. Rushmore of L.A. Stations
- Thread starter briancraig
- Start date
KFI was one of the few clear channel stations that could be picked up nearly all the way to the Atlantic. I recall DX'ers indicating they could get it in West Virginia on certain nights. For that feat alone, plus Vin Scully and the Dodgers in their '60s hey day, KFI needs to be included.
Not enough heads on the mountain. Narrowing it down to four? My best shot:
WABC, New York
WGN, Chicago (was big before and after WLS)
KROQ, Los Angeles
KMOX, St. Louis
Wow. I definitely wasn't around when newsradio sounded like that.I promise you, in sixteen minutes, you'll have had enough (February 2, 1964):
19640211 XETRA.mp3
drive.google.com
I bet you wish you weren't either.
But thanks for finding the clip. The amount of phase smear my ears hear in that audio kind of makes me wonder if it was being piped down to Mexico on equalized copper through AT&T's long lines network.
He may be referencing KFI's brief experiment with 80 kHz bandwidth, when out of desperation for any ratings, corporate ordered everything except Lohman and Barkley be programmed for cats.
My point was that PPM encoders have encoding aggressiveness vs. audibility adjustments, as I believe David once explained elsewhere. That made me speculate if the non-commercial classical and jazz stations may have been favoring non-aggressive settings to avoid complaints from their more acoustically-discerning demographic. (I.e., when your main metric for success as a non-profit station is the "ratings" flowing into your donations box, Nielsen numbers may not matter enough to you to set your encoder to an aggressive watermarking level -- or for you to even add any watermarking at all. For commercial broadcasters on the other hand, who would want to register as many hits per minute as possible, the incentive would be to set their encoders more toward the aggressive side of the spectrum. And if smooth jazz stations, as commercial broadcasters, did that without taking into account that their listeners may have been as sensitive to the sound of aggressive watermarking as those others...)
That said, thanks @davideduardo for the thorough explanation. Yes, I do remember you explanating before that at normal insertion levels the watermarking is inaudible. The crux of my pontificating was merely what I just clarified to TheBigA above. I see from your explanation what really happened now. Appreciated.
Except that those non-commercial classical and jazz stations are also struggling financially. So the concern about the "more acoustically discerning listeners" isn't translating into increased donations. WQXR has a huge budget shortfall.
NYPR Makes Deep Cuts to WQXR Amid $12M Budget Shortfall - Radio Ink
Details of New York Public Radio's second round of layoffs and cuts in a year due to ongoing budget challenges have been revealed.
radioink.com
Wow. I definitely wasn't around when newsradio sounded like that.
I bet you wish you weren't either.
When I heard KNX and KFWB after they went all-news, I said "Oh. So you CAN do it well."
No. It was what I described. A bunch of guys, a teletype and a microphone at the transmitter site in Mexico, commuting from their homes in San Diego. Outside audio would have to come via phone line, but not the programming itself.
That said, it may have been recorded off a listen line in the first place.
For a couple of months in 1968, KABC-FM tried all news. I remember that they said that they were the "all american" news station.
The "all american" thing was used by a lot of ABC stations. WABC referred to their DJs for a time as the "all americans."
Interesting, I always though it was because the first "LA" news station (XETRA) was based in Tijuana, BC Mex.
Weren't their employees citizens of the US?
It was December 27, 1966 until March 11, 1968. They went to music the day KFWB switched to news.
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They were. Tomas is misremembering.
What he heard was frequent IDs from KABC-FM's network programming. They carried the American Entertainment Network and put local newscasts inside it.
They didn't call it "All-American" and it wasn't related to WABC's "All-Americans" at all.
Unfortunately, in the Akron, Ohio area, WHLO is on 640 so no chance at picking up KFI even though WHLO's nightime signal dropped to 500 watts from 5000.
Not the Nielsen provided device. "Enhancement" comes from the Telos aftermarket one.
For the early decades of its life, WHLO was a daytimer with sign-off at sunset in LA. It has only been recently that WHLO got fulltime authorization.
I guess to include an out-of-country station, even though marketed to Detroit, CKLW. At least till someone in Canadian government had a tantrum about it.
Michael, I don't quite understand what I was misremembering...All I said was is that I thought KABC-FM called itself "all american" because XETRA was of course a Mexico based radio station.
I don’t think KABC-FM ever called itself that. I listened, and never heard it. It’s in none of their marketing. But several times an hour, as they transitioned from the network to local cut-ins, the words “This is The American Entertainment Radio Network, a service of ABC News” were followed by “KABC-FM.”
Are you sure that’s not what you were hearing?
Pretty sure...To me it seemed like a non-scripted ad lib from a local announcer. Sounded like a little jab at XETRA. But there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then...oh well.
Would they have needed work permits for Mexico?