• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

So,...In Detail, What Was The Full Story:

S

Scooter Lesley

Guest
So,...In Detail, What Was The Full Story,....regarding AM Stereo? For me, I never got the skinny truth explained to me, as to what happened, what was purposed, supposed, deposed....unposed.....strike a pose..... 660 WESC-AM was ready to go, but no one had a receiver to receive such. It is all water under the bridge, but does anyone know the story?
 
Scooter Lesley said:
So,...In Detail, What Was The Full Story,....regarding AM Stereo? For me, I never got the skinny truth explained to me, as to what happened, what was purposed, supposed, deposed....unposed.....strike a pose..... 660 WESC-AM was ready to go, but no one had a receiver to receive such. It is all water under the bridge, but does anyone know the story?
Click to expand...

The simple story:

By the late 70's, FM was catching up with AM in share of audience. The idea of AM stereo was intended to let FM compete with stereo on FM. It was supposed to be a done deal with the FCC approving the system by late '77 or early '78. At that time, AM still had half the audience and in theory had its own best platform to compete.

However, legal issues brought by one of the competing AM stereo systems took the decision to court and we did not have the eventual wimpy "marketplace" decision until the early 80's. By that time, FM was firmly in possession of the music audience. Because many big AMs had moved to talk formats, AM could not be saved for music as consumers increasingly found no good music stations on AM anyway.
 
As late as teh early 2000's many new car receivers had AM Stereo but as an unpromoted feature. In fact, most Visteon/Ford units did. It sounded very good if you could find a station broadcasting in AM Stereo. By then most had turned off the stereo generator in the belief that it hurt coverage and modulation levels.

I remember driving to Chicago and listening to WJR Detroit and the stereo pilot was on. The program was mono until stereo spots or jingles came on. Then it was "WOW!" But dittoheads could care less about hearing the right-wing talking points in stereo.
 
Some very good posts here, as we "Looky" at the single dashboard speaker. Other than memories, I don't have any facts to offer, regarding this topic.
I remember one of the Auto Makers offering a FM(only)/8-Track unit, and I thought that rather odd, but clearly...collectively, they were all going to bail!
The Mono sides of the 45's were (confirmed) different mixes, and reportedly, 10-db Louder. "Go All The Way" was so Hot, that needle would stand strait up like someone crossed Viagra with Niagara spray starch! To talk over the intro, and hit the post, you had to pot it down, and Yell! Are there any Engineers out there?
I'd Love to read some of their takes on the Topic. Please everyone read all these posts, as they are worth your time, and pondering.
 
Last edited:
It's too bad Bill Norman died. He used to post here and the station he had for a decade was in SC. But one of the stations he had before that tried AM stereo and he considered it a success. It was just a small-town station but he made it work.
 
Today, we still have Risk Takers, and most have enough money to waste, and write it all off, if it was to float belly-up. Let's say each county had one or maybe even two 1000-watt AM Stereo stations. Format to be determined, but certainly local, and with a rate card that even Willie, the part-time Plumber could afford!
If the receivers were there to receive, it would be a game changer,....in Stereo!

It's fun to ponder, but the Net can, and will do the same thing.
 
Last edited:
i think it is interesting that even pay radio narrows the bandwidth on the talk channels so it sounds like the am stations you are used to
 
AFAIK BE is still selling an AM Transmitter with a stereo encoder card as an add on. I was running it at a little 1K daytimer here in SC for a few years just for fun. Motorola C-Quam became the standard (poor old Leonard Kahn) and really sounds good if you can find a stereo receiver with a broad band tuner. It rivals most FM signals, especially when they process the ever living hell out something.

In the early 90's the NAB tried to bring am stereo back with their "AMAX" standards, encouraging the manufacture of stereo receivers for home and car but it didn't catch on. Denon made a special model for the NAB, the TU-680NAB home receiver, and it will blow your mind hearing AM on it as long as there is no lightening or major electrical interference close by. Even with the disgusting NRSC standards we have to abide that bottlenecks us and destroys the audio integrity of AM transmissions this receiver is so wide band it will pick up everything being transmitted while rejecting most of the "whistle" associated with reception on the edge of the modulated carrier. It does wonders for standard am broadcasts and is truly amazing on the very few am stereo signals still out there.

There is a little twin speaker Sony portable radio manufactured in the late 80's/early 90's that has a very wide band tuner and stereo chips in it. It even has the option of decoding C-Quam or Khan. If you slightly deviate off frequency it will falsify a stereo pilot tone on mono stations and does some interesting stuff with the phase modulation and creates a stereo simulation effect but the noise level is a little much. I have 3 of those little Sony radios. They are miles above the old GE Super radios for am audio quality.

If wider band receivers were more available and NRSC filters were removed there wouldn't be much debate on audio quality between modulated carrier and modulated frequency radio......well, except for the ten million badly filtered devices running on AC in homes and offices, lights, wi-fi, etc. that eat AM alive. It's still really interesting that with the right setup the Grand Ole Opry sounds better on WSM than on XM when the skywave is right. I'm guessing that Blaw-Knox tower is a little over 300 miles as the crow flies from my home. Well..I just nerded out for a while. Time to stop typing.
 
I had an a.m. stereo receiver on an 89 Olds Trofeo. It sounded pretty good. One of the local stations broadcast in stereo. I think WFBC a.m. was talk by that time. Maybe it was WESC.
 
When I was in Gaffney for a short time in '86-'87 I bought an '86 Toyota MR-2. It had an am-stereo radio in it, which was part of why I bought it. From vague (sorry guys) memory, I remember being annoyed that (I think it was) WBT was using Kahn and nothing else during the day was in stereo. At night there was always some dx in stereo if you looked long enough. The radio had a wonderful wideband am button that made everything sound GOOD again on the am band. I miss that radio. Earlier this week I was at my 590 (ex-Mouse) site here in Atlanta with some electricians. Started tuning my GE Super Radio around the am band in wideband mode and they were blown away by some stations sounding like fm. I've always thought the friendly cookie company should've mandated wider am audio response in receivers. Even a l-i-t-t-l-e bit would be nice. *sigh*. Bonus audio processing secret here: Way back in the day at the top 40 "Famous 91 WORD" we had a telco line equalizer in the back of the rack just before the final limiter which was a modded Volumax. It was set to throw a pretty good bit of pre-emphasis on the audio from ohhh 2, 2.5k to 15k. I played with it occasionally when I was there. Then there was the biased diode clipper right before the Continental 21-E transmitter. Can't run those anymore haha. Chainsawed the negative peaks off. Loud but brutal. The pre-emphasis made WORD sound really nice on car radios back then.
 
CJ_Jackson said:
When I was in Gaffney for a short time in '86-'87 I bought an '86 Toyota MR-2. It had an am-stereo radio in it, which was part of why I bought it. From vague (sorry guys) memory, I remember being annoyed that (I think it was) WBT was using Kahn and nothing else during the day was in stereo. At night there was always some dx in stereo if you looked long enough. The radio had a wonderful wideband am button that made everything sound GOOD again on the am band. I miss that radio. Earlier this week I was at my 590 (ex-Mouse) site here in Atlanta with some electricians. Started tuning my GE Super Radio around the am band in wideband mode and they were blown away by some stations sounding like fm. I've always thought the friendly cookie company should've mandated wider am audio response in receivers. Even a l-i-t-t-l-e bit would be nice. *sigh*. Bonus audio processing secret here: Way back in the day at the top 40 "Famous 91 WORD" we had a telco line equalizer in the back of the rack just before the final limiter which was a modded Volumax. It was set to throw a pretty good bit of pre-emphasis on the audio from ohhh 2, 2.5k to 15k. I played with it occasionally when I was there. Then there was the biased diode clipper right before the Continental 21-E transmitter. Can't run those anymore haha. Chainsawed the negative peaks off. Loud but brutal. The pre-emphasis made WORD sound really nice on car radios back then.
Click to expand...

There's nothing like old fashioned clipping! Running 100% Negatives right into a brick wall. That's what it literally looked like on a scope. The old transmitters would accept a lot of stuff new solid state ones wont. Oh, a 21E was a Collins, not Continental. Gray three cab art deco thing with windows and rectifiers right down front. You must have been at WORD early if they were still using a 21E.

I wish more radio people would share the "wideband" experience with the average listener and Super Radios aren't that scarce. Every am listener should have one. If you like the tuner on a Super Radio get your hands on a Sony SRF-A100. That little booger is better than the old GE's and they are smaller and more portable. They have chips to support Harris, Magnavox, Motorola, and Kahn-Hazeltine for any remaining stereo stations....well I doubt anyone has run Kahn in 40 years besides WLS. Even with the stupid NRSC filters we're forced to use today there is still a full 10k being broadcast and am listeners deserve to be able to hear it. Before the farmers chicken coop was so worried about adjacency noise and splatter because they didn't protect the spectrum and crammed adjacent licenses too close to each other AM really did sound fabulous but even old tube radios didn't receive much more than what we broadcast today because of noise.

BTW, was Don responsible for the audio chain at WORD during the time you were there? I have heard over the years that it was a very good sounding station on factory car radios. I never knew anything about the pre-emphasis. Why buy a Dorrough 310 when all you needed was a telephone equalizer! Was that one of the eq boxes for balanced lines like network news feeds and "church" broadcasts or was it an eq for actual single pair dialtone phone?
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom