% Reduction - AM reception range - increased noise - 1920 to 2024

[davideduardo]

Come to think of it, I recall Leonard sued Sony too for including a quasi-ISB tuner in their portable radio. Talk about more biting the hand that feeds.

Oh, Leonard, what big teeth you have!

When I was working with Bob Carver when he was developing a high-end AM stereo tuner, we found the same. That, and stations insisted on running asymmetrical modulation that caused the tuner a lot of problems. As Bob said publicly; working on an AM stereo receiver was the waste of an entire year of R&D.

So many people have the idea that FM took over the broadcast music scene in the 70's because stations were all in stereo.

Research I did back in that era indicated that the primary reason people moved to FM in that first explosive decade of 1969 to 1978 (the year FM achieved parity in ratings "shares" with AM) was, in order of importance:

• Far fewer commercials
• More kinds of music formats
• More stations that could be heard at the listener location (suburbs had outgrown coverage of many big city AMs)
• Less "stupid talk" between songs on pop music formats; "more music".
• Formats that never existed on AM, like album rock and modern Adult Contemporary and Gold.
• FM sounds better. (not a comment about stereo... just one about clarity and part of the next answer, too).
• No "static" (man made noise, ambient AM noise)
• Stereo.

So, in the larger markets I knew about, stereo was way down the list of reasons "why I started listening more to FM".

Adding stereo to AMs was not something that listeners wanted as their primary reasons for having moved to FM were other than that.

Many years later in a project for a Spanish language FM in the U.S. I asked about the station name which was "Stereo Latino". The first question was open-ended as "what does "stereo" mean to you?" and the overwhelming response was that "it sounds better than other stations" or "it sounds brighter than other stations".

A follow up was to pick of a list what "stereo" means. The list had things like "better sound quality" and "brighter sound" and "sounds like the sound surrounds you" and others. The top, overwhelming pick was "sounds better". Most listeners did not really "get" that "stereo" meant slightly different perspectives in the left and right channels... it was almost all the perception that "stereo" sounded cleaner, clearer and without noise.

Years and years later, the station dropped "Stereo" from its name. Management had refused to believe that left and right channel differences were not the main reason they listened to FM.

 

[Kelly A]

Oh, Leonard, what big teeth you have!

Well, Leonard certainly had a big mouth, and a huge ego, and his lawyer loved the propensity for filing lawsuits.

So many people have the idea that FM took over the broadcast music scene in the 70's because stations were all in stereo.

I suspect most of those people are right here on this site. Which, when you think about it, doesn't add up to many.

Many years later in a project for a Spanish language FM in the U.S. I asked about the station name which was "Stereo Latino". The first question was open-ended as "what does "stereo" mean to you?" and the overwhelming response was that "it sounds better than other stations" or "it sounds brighter than other stations".

A follow up was to pick of a list what "stereo" means. The list had things like "better sound quality" and "brighter sound" and "sounds like the sound surrounds you" and others. The top, overwhelming pick was "sounds better". Most listeners did not really "get" that "stereo" meant slightly different perspectives in the left and right channels... it was almost all the perception that "stereo" sounded cleaner, clearer and without noise.

Years and years later, the station dropped "Stereo" from its name. Management had refused to believe that left and right channel differences were not the main reason they listened to FM.

You're right. I recall back in my early teens when stereo first came out. Our high school station went stereo and printed bumper stickers that claimed Stereo 89. When you talked with a listener and asked what attracted them to listening, stereo never came up. It was all for similar reasons you listed.

 

[kfbkfb]

Any comparative listening tests using wideband (say 30 - 15kHz) mono and bandlimited stereo (say 30 - 7kHz [approximately AMAX specs]) to see is the stereo effect appeals to listeners more than better treble?


Kirk Bayne

 

[Schroedingers Cat]

Now that so many new FM facilities have squeezed in, full power, translators, and LPFM, cochannel interference noise in Stereo has caused many FM stations to go back to Mono. This is usually stations with talk type formats, but some lower power stations with other formats are doing it. They are able to squeeze a few more miles of usable service area this way. But FM Stereo has always had some limitations like that. Mono gets out further.

 

[yeoldeschool]

When I was working with Bob Carver when he was developing a high-end AM stereo tuner, we found the same. That, and stations insisted on running asymmetrical modulation that caused the tuner a lot of problems. As Bob said publicly; working on an AM stereo receiver was the waste of an entire year of R&D.

An old broadcast technology mentor and dyed in the wool audiophile friend from long ago had one of Bob's TX-11a receivers. It was the same model shown on WION's web site once upon a time. Do you know about how many of those he wound up selling? Your words make me wonder if he was disappointed in its sales success.

 

[yeoldeschool]

So many people have the idea that FM took over the broadcast music scene in the 70's because stations were all in stereo. Research I did back in that era indicated that the primary reason people moved to FM in that first explosive decade of 1969 to 1978 (the year FM achieved parity in ratings "shares" with AM) was, in order of importance:

• Far fewer commercials
• More kinds of music formats
• More stations that could be heard at the listener location (suburbs had outgrown coverage of many big city AMs)
• Less "stupid talk" between songs on pop music formats; "more music".
• Formats that never existed on AM, like album rock and modern Adult Contemporary and Gold.
• FM sounds better. (not a comment about stereo... just one about clarity and part of the next answer, too).
• No "static" (man made noise, ambient AM noise)
• Stereo.

I don't necessarily think these findings debunk stereo's importance to listeners, though. Even dedicated audiophiles would probably order their lists this way. Why bother caring about stereo, in other words, if (a) you're always drowning in ads, (b+c+e) the music is always the same old limited tired stuff, (d) the stupid jock talks as much as I type in some of my RD posts, (f) it's ruined by being muffled, and (g) it's ruined by noise and static. Your survey looks completely accurate with totally sensible results, but it seems to me that it actually shows that stereo is the first concern on the list, after you get past everything that would ruin a listening experience, and you can start turning your mind to aesthetics. Note for instance how insufficient dynamic range, excessive THD, audible cart wow/flutter, vinyl surface noise, and other aesthetic sensibilities (i.e. irritants rather than showstoppers) were either unreported to you or reported less often than stereo itself. To me, this shows that stereo does actually register as important to people, but that it's simply something they don't conceive of as relevant until and unless they can "get settled in," having dealt with or avoided any obstacles that would spoil/block the listening experience.

Shifting to one decade later, and from my perspective, I grew up in a time when radios were almost always called "stereos" (or "stereo systems"), as opposed to the older term, radios. Some back then would even ridiculously refer to mono radios as stereos and say that "that stereo only works in mono." And you went to stereo shops to buy those stereos -- not to electronics stores. (Heck, you went to stereo shops in the '70s, too.) And many boom boxes in the early through late 1980s had "mono / stereo / stereo wide" flip-switches, as if to emphasize how much people loved drinking up the effect of binaural sound ("more!"). Stereo was so important to ratings that Bob Orban charged extra for his 222A in 1988 by selling it separately rather than integrating it into future 8100s or his subsequent 8200. And he only created it in response to how many stations were using linear L-R amplification and blowing their feet off with the resulting hurricanes of multipath. In fact, the same audiophile mentor I mentioned in my previous post above considered mono to stereo synthesizers the bane of his existence, because they were absolutely everywhere in the 1980s as a result of Orban (and many others) selling tons of them to TV stations at the outset of BTSC, when there wasn't yet enough real stereo material coming out of Hollywood. By this last point alone, you could say stereo was so front-of-mind to even TV viewers back then that people who owned stereo TV sets wanted to hear it faked, if they couldn't hear the real thing.

So I'm not saying you're wrong about stereo being way down on any master list of priorities. But I think that such a list unfairly dismisses stereo's importance by placing base "requirements" (to even want to listen to anything in the first place) in the same category as the things that would matter once you're listening.

Adding stereo to AMs was not something that listeners wanted as their primary reasons for having moved to FM were other than that.

I think the move to FM would have never snowballed had C-QUAM stereo appeared on AM in 1969 and FM remained mono. FM would have become some kind of weird, high fidelity speech broadcasting service at best, and as the noise and static levels on AM became absurd by the 80s, then you would have started seeing some movement of music to mono FM -- by virtue of it being forced off stereo AM by the showstopper effect of static and noise. But that movement to FM would've been accompanied, guaranteed, by cries to the FCC to authorize a compatible FM stereo encoding scheme, and fast.

During the brief period where lots of AM and FM stations were both in stereo, I think the reason the average person chose FM stereo over AM stereo was simply ... why drink a flat soda when you can drink a fresh one.

Many years later in a project for a Spanish language FM in the U.S. I asked about the station name which was "Stereo Latino". The first question was open-ended as "what does "stereo" mean to you?" and the overwhelming response was that "it sounds better than other stations" or "it sounds brighter than other stations". A follow up was to pick of a list what "stereo" means. The list had things like "better sound quality" and "brighter sound" and "sounds like the sound surrounds you" and others. The top, overwhelming pick was "sounds better". Most listeners did not really "get" that "stereo" meant slightly different perspectives in the left and right channels... it was almost all the perception that "stereo" sounded cleaner, clearer and without noise.

But wait. To ordinary people with no technical knowledge of the mechanics of stereo, terms like "better," "clearer," and "brighter" would be precisely the ones they might use to describe their perception of the stereo image. Stereo is more pleasing in the general sense, so right there, that makes it "better." And "clearer" would be a valid description for how it makes different instruments more distinguishable (some are "over here," while others are "over there," leading to less crowding, and hence more "clarity" in each location). Even the word "brighter" could be attributed to those listeners' mental tracking of the stereo image, in the sense that mono sometimes cancels higher frequencies (imperfectly aligned carts or phase problems somewhere in the station/from your distributor). "Brighter" could also be how some individuals might describe stereo in so far as their minds being better able to pick out the harmonic overtones of individual instruments when those instruments were less buried in each other's ways.

Heck, audiophiles have difficulty putting the acoustic characteristics of flaws they perceive into words. How many audiophile forum threads have you seen filled with people bickering at each other, because everyone has a different way of describing the same exotic defect they're all hearing in a recording? I think this principle can be applied with ordinary people too, only in their cases, they can have difficulties conceptualizing and articulating the simple and basic things people like ourselves can instantly wrap our minds around and apply universally agreed terms to.

I can think of one interesting way to figure out how important stereo is to average people. Hand out earbuds to a focus group, with the earbuds' plug ends rigged into a Y configuration ending in two separate 3.5mm connectors. Give the group a red herring explanation for this, saying that each connector uses a different metal alloy and that after a month of listening, you want to know which they think sounds the best. (Say gold is getting too expensive, so you're trying to find some substitute that works as well as gold-tipped connectors, but that's visually identical to normal connectors.) Unbeknownst to them, one connector will internally mix L+R and give them mono in both ears. How much would you bet that by the end of the survey, everyone picked the stereo end?

Another variation would be giving people portable stereo bluetooth speakers, with a flip-switch for power that's internally rigged so when it's in the center position, the unit is off, but when it's in the left or right positions, it's on -- but in stereo only when flipped to the right. This time, just give the speakers to the group, saying it doesn't matter which way they flip the switch. Say nothing about it making a difference in the audio. Have a data-recording circuit sensor inside each speaker that records the total number of minutes, long term, that each was turned on to the left, versus to the right. You could even make sure half the speakers turned on in stereo to the left (instead of the right), and mix them up, handing the speakers out randomly, so that weird left/right psychological "biases" wouldn't even affect your results. Something tells me that when you got all the speakers back and downloaded their data for analysis, there would be a massive preference for whatever direction made each work in stereo. That people would have tried the switch both ways just out of curiosity, sensed the better sound in one direction versus the other, consciously or semi-consciously, and whether they understood that it was stereo or not, they would've preferred the stereo.

 

[Kelly A]

An old broadcast technology mentor and dyed in the wool audiophile friend from long ago had one of Bob's TX-11a receivers. It was the same model shown on WION's web site once upon a time. Do you know about how many of those he wound up selling? Your words make me wonder if he was disappointed in its sales success.

I never asked Bob about sales numbers. I know that most people purchased the receiver as a part of a larger system, not specifically for AM stereo.
Bob speculated that most probably never even paid attention that the tuner could demodulate AM stereo. In fact, given the disappointing performance of the majority of AM stereo stations through the tuner, he was glad nobody was paying attention.

 

[Dr. Bob]

An additional factor of the increase in the noise level of the AM broadcast band is the increase of the power line distribution voltage. For many years the distribution voltage to residential neighborhoods was 2,300 or 4,160 volts. In the ‘70’s and 80’s the distribution voltages rose in many areas to 13,800 volts which caused additional noise from corona discharge and arcing issues from dirty or defective insulators. All of this was was in an effort to reduce “copper” losses due to the fact that the efficiency of the distribution system for a given wire size is dependent on the current. More recently, some systems are using 35,000 volts to distribute electricity in residential areas. Needless to say, this has only caused more noise issues for the AM broadcast band.

 

[davideduardo]

I think the move to FM would have never snowballed had C-QUAM stereo appeared on AM in 1969 and FM remained mono. FM would have become some kind of weird, high fidelity speech broadcasting service at best, and as the noise and static levels on AM became absurd by the 80s, then you would have started seeing some movement of music to mono FM -- by virtue of it being forced off stereo AM by the showstopper effect of static and noise. But that movement to FM would've been accompanied, guaranteed, by cries to the FCC to authorize a compatible FM stereo encoding scheme, and fast.

But in 1969, we had seen nearly two decades of FM stereo, while more than half of all listening and about 70% of music listening had gone to FM by 1967.

During the brief period where lots of AM and FM stations were both in stereo, I think the reason the average person chose FM stereo over AM stereo was simply ... why drink a flat soda when you can drink a fresh one.

You are forgetting that, during the 70's, almost all FMs limited commercials to under 10 minutes an hour. AMs generally exceeded that. But the biggest factors were that formats like AOR and Beautiful Music had little if any AM impact in that decade but were the big winners on FM... and... the big AND... most metro area FMs covered their market vastly better than, at best, all but a couple of local AMs.

But wait. To ordinary people with no technical knowledge of the mechanics of stereo, terms like "better," "clearer," and "brighter" would be precisely the ones they might use to describe their perception of the stereo image. Stereo is more pleasing in the general sense, so right there, that makes it "better." And "clearer" would be a valid description for how it makes different instruments more distinguishable (some are "over here," while others are "over there," leading to less crowding, and hence more "clarity" in each location).

I built and put on the air northern South America's first FM and first stereo FM. The term "stereo" was highly promotional, but really did not have any effect on ratings or revenue. We billed as much before going stereo as we did afterwards and the ratings did not change at all.

Even the word "brighter" could be attributed to those listeners' mental tracking of the stereo image, in the sense that mono sometimes cancels higher frequencies (imperfectly aligned carts or phase problems somewhere in the station/from your distributor). "Brighter" could also be how some individuals might describe stereo in so far as their minds being better able to pick out the harmonic overtones of individual instruments when those instruments were less buried in each other's ways.

The average FM listener... or radio listener overall... used radio to accompany something else, whether it be making a meal in the kitchen, doing homework from school or fixing cars in the auto repair shop. Nearly nobody paid as much attention to the radio as you seem to believe.

Heck, audiophiles have difficulty putting the acoustic characteristics of flaws they perceive into words. How many audiophile forum threads have you seen filled with people bickering at each other, because everyone has a different way of describing the same exotic defect they're all hearing in a recording? I think this principle can be applied with ordinary people too, only in their cases, they can have difficulties conceptualizing and articulating the simple and basic things people like ourselves can instantly wrap our minds around and apply universally agreed terms to.

I don't think that the average FM listener in the transitional AM to FM exodus period of the 70's every thought about that. FM had more music formats to offer, and many never existed at all on AM. The signals in essentially every market were better on FM and the general sound quality was better. But, still, the big selling point was fewer commercials and better music selections.

I can think of one interesting way to figure out how important stereo is to average people. Hand out earbuds to a focus group, with the earbuds' plug ends rigged into a Y configuration ending in two separate 3.5mm connectors. Give the group a red herring explanation for this, saying that each connector uses a different metal alloy and that after a month of listening, you want to know which they think sounds the best. (Say gold is getting too expensive, so you're trying to find some substitute that works as well as gold-tipped connectors, but that's visually identical to normal connectors.) Unbeknownst to them, one connector will internally mix L+R and give them mono in both ears. How much would you bet that by the end of the survey, everyone picked the stereo end?

Maybe, if the program choices were the same. But in the case of competitive markets where FM took over, universally, from AM, the reasons for changing from one to the other were not stereo sound.

Another variation would be giving people portable stereo bluetooth speakers, with a flip-switch for power that's internally rigged so when it's in the center position, the unit is off, but when it's in the left or right positions, it's on -- but in stereo only when flipped to the right. This time, just give the speakers to the group, saying it doesn't matter which way they flip the switch. Say nothing about it making a difference in the audio. Have a data-recording circuit sensor inside each speaker that records the total number of minutes, long term, that each was turned on to the left, versus to the right. You could even make sure half the speakers turned on in stereo to the left (instead of the right), and mix them up, handing the speakers out randomly, so that weird left/right psychological "biases" wouldn't even affect your results. Something tells me that when you got all the speakers back and downloaded their data for analysis, there would be a massive preference for whatever direction made each work in stereo. That people would have tried the switch both ways just out of curiosity, sensed the better sound in one direction versus the other, consciously or semi-consciously, and whether they understood that it was stereo or not, they would've preferred the stereo.

In the earlier 50's, radio changed from mostly night listening to network drama, comedy and variety shows to music formats. By the middle of the decade, Rock 'n' Roll had created an even better magnet to music radio, and we ended up with a music and talk system, while TV took over the drama and other stuff. That meant that people used radio not as a "gather around the set with the family" medium but a companionship medium.

As people listened at work, in the home and in the car, they did not really pay much attention to stereo even if they were in an ideal "seated between two speakers" environment. Radio was for a different purpose. Yes, FM was clearer than AM. And most metro AM stations had long ago seen urban sprawl outgrow their 1930's signals. And FM had, overall, less commercials and lots more different and more focused music formats. And those were the reasons FM, in the end, became so dominant.

 

[jonsmth62]

The biggest problem I see with FM in Car Radios is that the signals are usually mono or close to mono since most auto car radios, tend to eliminate stereo as the signal weakens or is subject to multi-path in order to eliminate noise in the receiver. I live in Western MA which is part of the Albany NY Radio/TV market. Therefore, I'm 30 - 40 plus miles from most of the Albany NY FM transmitters with several mountains between me and the transmitters. It is very rare that I can receive an FM Station with a strong enough signal to drive Stereo. I do prefer the Stereo signal as well as the "HD" signals available on some of the stations, but have learned to not expect it and am pleasantly surprised when I do pick up a signal in Stereo or "HD".

 

[yeoldeschool]

I never asked Bob about sales numbers. I know that most people purchased the receiver as a part of a larger system, not specifically for AM stereo. Bob speculated that most probably never even paid attention that the tuner could demodulate AM stereo. In fact, given the disappointing performance of the majority of AM stereo stations through the tuner, he was glad nobody was paying attention.

When the aforementioned audiophile engineer friend would send me sample digital recordings of AM stations in his city made with his TX-11a (stations with or without C-QUAM), I realized that each one was being made unlistenable by its extreme preemphasis into its processor's distortion-canceled clippers. Each station was trying so hard to counteract the severe roll-off in consumer radios, they destroyed their ability to sound good on the very radios out there purposely designed to try breathing new viability into the AM band.

The irony.

I'm experiencing the same effect with the DX-286 any time I open the bandwidth up to 8 kHz. It sounds clear, but also so dense that I sometimes want to back it down to 6 kHz or even retreat to the default 4 kHz.

 

[Kelly A]

When the aforementioned audiophile engineer friend would send me sample digital recordings of AM stations in his city made with his TX-11a (stations with or without C-QUAM), I realized that each one was being made unlistenable by its extreme preemphasis into its processor's distortion-canceled clippers. Each station was trying so hard to counteract the severe roll-off in consumer radios, they destroyed their ability to sound good on the very radios out there purposely designed to try breathing new viability into the AM band.

The irony.

I'm experiencing the same effect with the DX-286 any time I open the bandwidth up to 8 kHz. It sounds clear, but also so dense that I sometimes want to back it down to 6 kHz or even retreat to the default 4 kHz.

And between a poor interface between the AM stereo exciter and the transmitter, plus many excessively narrow-banded antenna systems, the competitive nature of running excessive compression and clipping made it difficult to replicate the AM stereo manufacturer's claims for performance. Especially since all but one of our test stations insisted on running asymmetrical modulation.
Between all the inconsistent technical challenges from station to station, Leonard suing everyone, and the audience already moved on to FM for music, AM stereo could be considered one of the milestone technical failures of radio.

 

[semoochie]

I don't necessarily think these findings debunk stereo's importance to listeners, though. Even dedicated audiophiles would probably order their lists this way. Why bother caring about stereo, in other words, if (a) you're always drowning in ads, (b+c+e) the music is always the same old limited tired stuff, (d) the stupid jock talks as much as I type in some of my RD posts, (f) it's ruined by being muffled, and (g) it's ruined by noise and static. Your survey looks completely accurate with totally sensible results, but it seems to me that it actually shows that stereo is the first concern on the list, after you get past everything that would ruin a listening experience, and you can start turning your mind to aesthetics. Note for instance how insufficient dynamic range, excessive THD, audible cart wow/flutter, vinyl surface noise, and other aesthetic sensibilities (i.e. irritants rather than showstoppers) were either unreported to you or reported less often than stereo itself. To me, this shows that stereo does actually register as important to people, but that it's simply something they don't conceive of as relevant until and unless they can "get settled in," having dealt with or avoided any obstacles that would spoil/block the listening experience.

Shifting to one decade later, and from my perspective, I grew up in a time when radios were almost always called "stereos" (or "stereo systems"), as opposed to the older term, radios. Some back then would even ridiculously refer to mono radios as stereos and say that "that stereo only works in mono." And you went to stereo shops to buy those stereos -- not to electronics stores. (Heck, you went to stereo shops in the '70s, too.) And many boom boxes in the early through late 1980s had "mono / stereo / stereo wide" flip-switches, as if to emphasize how much people loved drinking up the effect of binaural sound ("more!"). Stereo was so important to ratings that Bob Orban charged extra for his 222A in 1988 by selling it separately rather than integrating it into future 8100s or his subsequent 8200. And he only created it in response to how many stations were using linear L-R amplification and blowing their feet off with the resulting hurricanes of multipath. In fact, the same audiophile mentor I mentioned in my previous post above considered mono to stereo synthesizers the bane of his existence, because they were absolutely everywhere in the 1980s as a result of Orban (and many others) selling tons of them to TV stations at the outset of BTSC, when there wasn't yet enough real stereo material coming out of Hollywood. By this last point alone, you could say stereo was so front-of-mind to even TV viewers back then that people who owned stereo TV sets wanted to hear it faked, if they couldn't hear the real thing.

So I'm not saying you're wrong about stereo being way down on any master list of priorities. But I think that such a list unfairly dismisses stereo's importance by placing base "requirements" (to even want to listen to anything in the first place) in the same category as the things that would matter once you're listening.

I think the move to FM would have never snowballed had C-QUAM stereo appeared on AM in 1969 and FM remained mono. FM would have become some kind of weird, high fidelity speech broadcasting service at best, and as the noise and static levels on AM became absurd by the 80s, then you would have started seeing some movement of music to mono FM -- by virtue of it being forced off stereo AM by the showstopper effect of static and noise. But that movement to FM would've been accompanied, guaranteed, by cries to the FCC to authorize a compatible FM stereo encoding scheme, and fast.

During the brief period where lots of AM and FM stations were both in stereo, I think the reason the average person chose FM stereo over AM stereo was simply ... why drink a flat soda when you can drink a fresh one.

But wait. To ordinary people with no technical knowledge of the mechanics of stereo, terms like "better," "clearer," and "brighter" would be precisely the ones they might use to describe their perception of the stereo image. Stereo is more pleasing in the general sense, so right there, that makes it "better." And "clearer" would be a valid description for how it makes different instruments more distinguishable (some are "over here," while others are "over there," leading to less crowding, and hence more "clarity" in each location). Even the word "brighter" could be attributed to those listeners' mental tracking of the stereo image, in the sense that mono sometimes cancels higher frequencies (imperfectly aligned carts or phase problems somewhere in the station/from your distributor). "Brighter" could also be how some individuals might describe stereo in so far as their minds being better able to pick out the harmonic overtones of individual instruments when those instruments were less buried in each other's ways.

Heck, audiophiles have difficulty putting the acoustic characteristics of flaws they perceive into words. How many audiophile forum threads have you seen filled with people bickering at each other, because everyone has a different way of describing the same exotic defect they're all hearing in a recording? I think this principle can be applied with ordinary people too, only in their cases, they can have difficulties conceptualizing and articulating the simple and basic things people like ourselves can instantly wrap our minds around and apply universally agreed terms to.

I can think of one interesting way to figure out how important stereo is to average people. Hand out earbuds to a focus group, with the earbuds' plug ends rigged into a Y configuration ending in two separate 3.5mm connectors. Give the group a red herring explanation for this, saying that each connector uses a different metal alloy and that after a month of listening, you want to know which they think sounds the best. (Say gold is getting too expensive, so you're trying to find some substitute that works as well as gold-tipped connectors, but that's visually identical to normal connectors.) Unbeknownst to them, one connector will internally mix L+R and give them mono in both ears. How much would you bet that by the end of the survey, everyone picked the stereo end?

Another variation would be giving people portable stereo bluetooth speakers, with a flip-switch for power that's internally rigged so when it's in the center position, the unit is off, but when it's in the left or right positions, it's on -- but in stereo only when flipped to the right. This time, just give the speakers to the group, saying it doesn't matter which way they flip the switch. Say nothing about it making a difference in the audio. Have a data-recording circuit sensor inside each speaker that records the total number of minutes, long term, that each was turned on to the left, versus to the right. You could even make sure half the speakers turned on in stereo to the left (instead of the right), and mix them up, handing the speakers out randomly, so that weird left/right psychological "biases" wouldn't even affect your results. Something tells me that when you got all the speakers back and downloaded their data for analysis, there would be a massive preference for whatever direction made each work in stereo. That people would have tried the switch both ways just out of curiosity, sensed the better sound in one direction versus the other, consciously or semi-consciously, and whether they understood that it was stereo or not, they would've preferred the stereo.

Binaural sound is intended for headphone use and is recorded using a dummy head and placing microphones where the ears should be.

 

[semoochie]

But in 1969, we had seen nearly two decades of FM stereo, while more than half of all listening and about 70% of music listening had gone to FM by 1967.

You are forgetting that, during the 70's, almost all FMs limited commercials to under 10 minutes an hour. AMs generally exceeded that. But the biggest factors were that formats like AOR and Beautiful Music had little if any AM impact in that decade but were the big winners on FM... and... the big AND... most metro area FMs covered their market vastly better than, at best, all but a couple of local AMs.

I built and put on the air northern South America's first FM and first stereo FM. The term "stereo" was highly promotional, but really did not have any effect on ratings or revenue. We billed as much before going stereo as we did afterwards and the ratings did not change at all.

The average FM listener... or radio listener overall... used radio to accompany something else, whether it be making a meal in the kitchen, doing homework from school or fixing cars in the auto repair shop. Nearly nobody paid as much attention to the radio as you seem to believe.

I don't think that the average FM listener in the transitional AM to FM exodus period of the 70's every thought about that. FM had more music formats to offer, and many never existed at all on AM. The signals in essentially every market were better on FM and the general sound quality was better. But, still, the big selling point was fewer commercials and better music selections.

Maybe, if the program choices were the same. But in the case of competitive markets where FM took over, universally, from AM, the reasons for changing from one to the other were not stereo sound.

In the earlier 50's, radio changed from mostly night listening to network drama, comedy and variety shows to music formats. By the middle of the decade, Rock 'n' Roll had created an even better magnet to music radio, and we ended up with a music and talk system, while TV took over the drama and other stuff. That meant that people used radio not as a "gather around the set with the family" medium but a companionship medium.

As people listened at work, in the home and in the car, they did not really pay much attention to stereo even if they were in an ideal "seated between two speakers" environment. Radio was for a different purpose. Yes, FM was clearer than AM. And most metro AM stations had long ago seen urban sprawl outgrow their 1930's signals. And FM had, overall, less commercials and lots more different and more focused music formats. And those were the reasons FM, in the end, became so dominant.

Your first sentence lost me. The FCC approved FM stereo in 1961!

 

[davideduardo]

Binaural sound is intended for headphone use and is recorded using a dummy head and placing microphones where the ears should be.

Where have you seen that done?

 

[radiofan2023]

Where have you seen that done?

This explains more about it:

index

Binaural_Recording

Kunstkopf

 

[semoochie]

Where have you seen that done?

I haven't actually seen it but learned about it in college about 52 years ago. As I recall the object was to replicate the experience of sitting in a concert hall, listening to an orchestra but it would only work properly when using headphones. Radiofan's link appears to explain it but I'm surprised by the late date given.

 

[Mark Roberts]

Did that later become Wherehouse Music? I always preferred The Music Exchange in KC (RIP) and my brother liked Vintage Stock, further up Metcalf.

I think it was Sound Warehouse, part of a chain. Music Exchange in Westport was great. There was another store, whose name I've forgotten, in that little side street where Westport Road ends at Main. And there was Pennylane on Broadway at the south edge of Westport. Because Kansas City radio was so stuck in the past in the 1990s (take KY-102, please!), I have tons of CDs bought at those places. If anyone ever wants to do an early 1990s indie/dance/ambient format, I've got lots of that stuff. Operators are standing by!

 

[radiofan2023]

There was another store, whose name I've forgotten, in that little side street where Westport Road ends at Main.

Was it Streetside Records?

 

[Mark Roberts]

Was it Streetside Records?

No, that was on Westport Road down the hill from Westport Square. By that time, Streetside also owned Pennylane. They kept both stores going for a while even though they were only about four blocks apart, and finally closed Streetside. The Streetside name was more meaningful to people from St. Louis, where the chain had started. There was a Streetside in Columbia, too. In the 1980s, several KFRU DJs moonlighted there. They thought I was just some other super-serious news guy until they saw some of the stuff I bought. One was particularly shocked that I bought a Translator album. They also told me that, if you went into the basement of that building, a creek ran through it. That building in Columbia is gone now.