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Philly FM processing = GARBAGE!

L

LA_Guy

Friday night I drive from Philly to New york, As I was driving out of town I had Ben FM on and "Love Her Madly" by The Doors came on. This song (either vinyl or CD) has EXCELLENT sound - and on Ben is sounded so so. HOWEVER, as I drove closer to NYC I put WCBS-FM on and guess what song they played? Yep. And let me tell you, BEN sounds like absolute CRAP compared to CBS-FM!! The song sounded like the CD on CBS and an old, scratchy 45 on Ben - with very little separation.

I have been a broadcast engineer for 30 plus years. It isn't hard to make stations sound great, and I have done so multiple times. How come no one in Philly is capable of doing this? How come none of the programming types here seem to care?

I don't get it.
 
Yes, our provincial backwater just figured out how to use the FM band, so give us a chance... ;D

Jeez, find something else to worry about. I'd much rather listen to Philly FM (even if the processing=garbage) then the New York radio dial, which is the most bland in the country!
 
Though LA has a point. I've noticed at some stops (not all) that management does not always care about signal quality. Drives me up a wall when that should be priority one. The medium is sound right? Shouldn't it sound as good as you can get it?

I know money is really priority one... but come on. If you're selling your 'sound', that includes not only your content, but also the way consumers/listeners actually physically hear you.
 
In 1984, when I moved to Philadelphia, one of the first upgrades I made to the station was replacing the CBS Labs stuff with an Optimod 8100. No XT chassis or anything else in the chain (other than composite STL) but I recall that our loudness was very competitive with release time set to 3. In those days, the FM stations generally had more depth in their processing, but I don't care for the way most of them sound today.
 
If you wrote that you heard "Love Her Madly" on WBEB 101.1 and then WCBS-FM 101.1, that would be just slightly more shocking.
 
I have to agree with LA Guy, and for the most part, AM processing isn't much better.

It seems like FM is still fighting the loudness wars and trying to squeeze every 100th of a db they can out of their signals. That's not the way to go anymore, and I've been saying that for more than two years. You are no longer just competing against other FM stations (or AM stations) but SiriusXM, Ipods, Iphones, CD's (although they are becoming more passe) and other sources whose audio is, for the most part, clean and largely unprocessed (at least compared to broadcast).

The old school mindset that you have to be LOUD!!!!! in order to attract an audience is, and always has been a falacy. The only people who punch the buttons checking loudness are GMs and PDs. The public could care less. They want it to sound good. Even processor manufacturers are now realizing this: for instance, the new Omnia .11 which maintains acceptable loudness but whose algorithms actually work too clean up the audio at the same time. I saw Frank Foti demonstrate this a few months back in New York at a combined SBE/AES meeting. The results are remarkable.

Other markets, like New York and Boston, have really cleaned up their acts recently. Here in Philly it's the same old same old. Push it for all it's worth: damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
 
When I was a starting out, WMID had purchased a Derough multiband processor, an amazing piece of equipment for it's day some 35 years ago. With the station's wideband antenna, it was simply sparkling. It was set for the PD's Delco in his Pontiac, figuring that was the most popular radio around. On anything else, it was even better. But other stations kept notching it up with more average loudness, and eventually made us sound somewhat anemic. After weeks of whining, the CE Nate Rosenthal gave in a little, and adjusted a wee bit. Then he left a not so subtle reminder to Programming that their job is to garner listeners with the right tunes. His is to made it sound good, and deliver it with the strongest signal allowed. He simply stapled a poster to the outside of his office door. A striking photo of an electrical storm, with the quote: "Thunder is good. Thunder is impressive. But it's the lightning that does the work." - Albert Einstein
 
My only observation is that nothing jumps out at me - Q102 has sounded better lately (low end used to sound horrible and not tight at all..Wired has great lows but no highs. The other commercial stations are just there....nothing jumps out at me like KTU's audio in NYC or like CBS-FM's used to.

I like WRTI's audio - very clean and fits the format perfectly. However, the worst FM audio isn't in Philly - that honor goes to WKCI "KC 101" in New Haven. It sounds AWFUL...like someone forgot to turn the preeemphasis on.
 
amfmsw said:
When I was a starting out, WMID had purchased a Derough multiband processor, an amazing piece of equipment for it's day some 35 years ago. With the station's wideband antenna, it was simply sparkling.
Click to expand...

I installed a Dorough DAP 310 at WPTR in Albany in 1978. It sounded incredible, especially when placed beside the old Audimax/Volumax combination we'd been using. The only problem with the DAP was that the clipping section was extremely brutal if you pushed it too hard. I made a few minor modifications to the clipper which improved things a bit, allowing us to keep the "sparkling DAP sound" and gain a bit of loudness. The only other mods I ever did was to change the capacitors that controlled the release times of the three bands to speed things up a bit. Nothing drastic; just enough to give a bit of an edge over WTRY, our major competition. It probably helped that the transmitter was also a was brand spanking new Harris MW50A; and like WMID, we also had an incredibly broadband antenna system. Between the DAP, the MW50A, and the antenna, WPTR easily passed an FM proof on several occasions. (This was, of course, before the advent of the 10khz NRSC limit.). It also helped that we did not use the MW50A's distortion enhancer (er, I mean, modulation enhancer) and we operated with the transmitter's Bessel filter out of the circuit. Instead, I built a very sharp 15khz lo-pass filter based on the lo-pass filter in the Orban 8000A Optimod we were using on WFLY-FM at the tiem.

All in all, there was nothing like the Dorough DAP at the time, with or without mods. IMHO, they still sounded better than the original Optimod 9000 that came out shortly thereafter.
 
WKCI KC-101 has always been one of the worst sounding FM stations in the US going back well into the 70's, an absurd flat sounding wall of distorted audio, seemed to have no semblance of Frequency Modulation other than somehow appearing in the middle of the FM band. Deliberate sabotage by its competitors
could never create anything that bad.
 
Rene is right-FM here sounds like crap--and I stand corrected--the Doors were on 102.9, not Ben (My wife reminded me). At least with AM there's a reason to be loud-loudness affects your range (AM = Amplitude Modulation, where the stregnth of the carrier goes up and down to the audio impressed upon it). FM has no real reason to be loud, except to perhaps overcome road noise in cars but there's never any reason to squash FM audio into oblivion! WCBS is plenty loud without being squashed and is quite competitive sounding.

What's really cool is that we have two engineers who have made some of the best sounding radio anywhere commenting-Rene from WPTR's heyday and Chris from KISS 108, Boston's heyday.
 
One of the best sounding stations on AM (in the past) would have to be WQXR/WQEW 1560 during the classical and standards formats. Even since they sold out to "the Mouse", 1560 has sounded awful, especially with that IBOC crap on the sides. Ironic... really as this was one of those original "hi-fidelity" stations the FCC commissioned back in the 40's. Surprisingly, WBBR/1130 from New York still maintains a rather clean sounding audio chain (just like the old WNEW did), even with their Bloomberg talk/information format. WCAU-FM/98.1 (now WOGL) used to have one of the cleanest sounding during the original oldies format, pre-Disco and "Hot Hits!". I've been told that Philadelphia was one of the first markets to experiment with unique FM programming as far back as the late 50's and early 60's. I think the advent of "American Bandstand" probably contributed to the early adoption of new and unique FM formats of the day. Who knows? :)
 
chrish said:
WKCI KC-101 has always been one of the worst sounding FM stations in the US going back well into the 70's, an absurd flat sounding wall of distorted audio, seemed to have no semblance of Frequency Modulation other than somehow appearing in the middle of the FM band. Deliberate sabotage by its competitors
could never create anything that bad.
Click to expand...

I'm amazed it sounds that bad - WEBE 108 sounds great, as does TIC-FM. With competition like that, you would figure that they would at least TRY to not sound like a Sure Level Loc into CBS Volumax....
 
Peter Q. George (K1XRB) said:
WCAU-FM/98.1 (now WOGL) used to have one of the cleanest sounding during the original oldies format, pre-Disco and "Hot Hits!".
Click to expand...
I remember listening to WOGL in the mid 2000s (2003 to 2007) and was blown away at how open the sound was with just a whisper of Optimod. It was one of the station that was a pleasure to listen to for the audio alone. Of course the music, which I liked, helped. :D ;)
 
KC101 is p pretty bad (is the web stream a good judge?)
in Philly WXPN is good.
WKZY in gainsville FL is Excelent!
WGTS is good.
WOGL is good.
WKXW in trenton is horible!
WTHK (the former hawk was horible!
W FPG in atlantic City is horible!
Perhaps some of this is personal preffrence.
The things I like about WKZY WXPn and WGTS is that they have somewhat of a dynamic range.
WOGL at leats doesn't sound clipped.
WKXW i think is worse sounding then WKCI! now KCI does have much less on the high end.
WCHR-FM is better sounding then it used to be. it used to sound horibly clipped (to my ears)
 
John Holcomb II said:
KC101 is p pretty bad (is the web stream a good judge?)
in Philly WXPN is good.
WKZY in gainsville FL is Excelent!
WGTS is good.
WOGL is good.
WKXW in trenton is horible!
WTHK (the former hawk was horible!
W FPG in atlantic City is horible!
Perhaps some of this is personal preffrence.
The things I like about WKZY WXPn and WGTS is that they have somewhat of a dynamic range.
WOGL at leats doesn't sound clipped.
WKXW i think is worse sounding then WKCI! now KCI does have much less on the high end.
WCHR-FM is better sounding then it used to be. it used to sound horibly clipped (to my ears)
Click to expand...

101.5 is LOUD and very in your face, and always borders on distortion (or it may be distorted, depending on your POV). But it works for what they do...WCHR-FM is sounding a lot better due to a processor change a year or two ago IIRC.

And the KC101 webstream doesn't do justice to the atrocity that is the FM signal. I agree with you on WXPN
 
POV?
the in your face is tolerable for talk (when there is no music in the background), but not the camersials, and music on weekend.
 
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