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Strubel Responds to Tom Ray
- Thread starter TheBigA
- Start date
Savage said:
WCBS-AM in New York, for one. WFAN-AM for another. CBS is one of only a handful of companies doing 24/7 local news on AM. Entercom is another. These are two companies that consistantly have Top 10 rated AM stations that run largely local content. And WCBS-AM is one of the Top 10 billers in all of radio, not just AM.
Yes I'm aware of your problem with CBS, and I expected a tirade from you. If their HD is driving away listeners, why is the very station that is interfering with you #1 in Boston? Obviously not driving away people there, are they? If you look at radio ratings in major markets across the country, the very few AM stations in the Top 10 are usually owned by CBS or Entercom.
I think it's laughable to use a radio station with a cume of 25,000 as an example of success in AM. But believe what you want to believe.
Uh-huh. Back to the good old ad hominem attack. Last on the list in the limited arsenal of closet HD freaks, which generally can be enumerated thusly when confronted with obvious truths about IBOC:
1. Attack AM as "dead" (unless, apparently, the station is owned by CBS)
2. Complain that radio is irrelevant, unless they're in HD
3. Attack other broadcasters and belittle their efforts - even when you know nothing about them
4. When all else fails, get in other posters' faces to try to get the thread tossed to TIO
I'm with Carmine. You're on "ignore" for me. Have fun pestering people for no good reason, here and on about 15 other threads on this board. In parting: and thanks for finally revealing your motives as an affiliate of CBS.
1. Attack AM as "dead" (unless, apparently, the station is owned by CBS)
2. Complain that radio is irrelevant, unless they're in HD
3. Attack other broadcasters and belittle their efforts - even when you know nothing about them
4. When all else fails, get in other posters' faces to try to get the thread tossed to TIO
I'm with Carmine. You're on "ignore" for me. Have fun pestering people for no good reason, here and on about 15 other threads on this board. In parting: and thanks for finally revealing your motives as an affiliate of CBS.
Savage said:
No attack. I like you. I support your points about WBZ. That's no reason to hate CBS Radio.
I have never said anything in support of HD Radio. If you can find anything, show me. Just because I'm not among the haters doesn't mean the opposite is true. And I wasn't attacking KRKO, just saying that using a station that runs syndication 24/7 as an example of success on AM is wrong. I stand by that.
By the way, I'm not an "affiliate of CBS" or in any way connected with them. Just an outside observer who happens to notice that they tend to have top rated AM stations.
But go ahead and ignore. Same with anyone else.
TheBigA said:
One reason, they have been the big gun here for decades and are the oldest radio station around, they used to be one of the strongest stations on the AM dial here also. Their hash machine seems to have cut into that however. Many people here listen to them for their traffic reports, I even tune in for it and then go right back to whatever I'm listening to at that moment.
Don Juan (not his real name) said:
Hey, the Troll Under The Bridge has woke up from his snooze.
OK everyone, get ready for more insightful grade school level argument. Good stuff like this:
"You ate my paste"
"No I didn't"
"Yes you did"
"Then what's that dripping down your chin?"
"Nothing"
"Here, chew on this crayon and go away"
"Wow, purple...my favorite...ok, bye"
Hey, the Troll Under The Bridge has woke up from his snooze.
OK everyone, get ready for more insightful grade school level argument. Good stuff like this:
"You ate my paste"
"No I didn't"
"Yes you did"
"Then what's that dripping down your chin?"
"Nothing"
"Here, chew on this crayon and go away"
"Wow, purple...my favorite...ok, bye"
The flamethrowing aside, I actually have an example of how HD 'hurts' WBZ. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 99.5% of those who listen to WBZ via its over the air signal do so in analog (most of the other 0.5% catch it as an FM HD feed). You'll have to admit that - of the few HD radios that ARE in the hands of consumers - a significant percentage don't even offer AM. Particularly the portables.
That being said, in order to accommodate WBZ's HD signal, their analog signal has been compressed into a narrower bandwidth. The net result of this is that WBZ's audio sounds flat and listless. Even the sound levels appear to be lower. Flip back and forth between WBZ and a non-IBOC station like WRKO and you'll hear what I mean. WRKO sounds like FM when compared with the crap audio now heard on WBZ. Whether that lousy audio has driven a few listeners away is hard to say....but it sure hasn't added any.
Now, WBZ (AM) is also offered on 98.5 HD-3. That feed is advantageous to CBS Radio. Yes, the technology is still crap and the HD-2+ signals are still full of drop-outs as you move around, but at least there is some value that can be gleaned from it. The AM feed is useless in that nobody is listening to it, it spreads interference over an appallingly wide slice of the spectrum (damaging other properties), and it results in a station's analog signal having to be compressed and hence sounding flat.
And don't try to argue that WBZ's analog audio doesn't sound like crap, because it does. And it has ever since they fired up the exciter.
That's how it potentially 'hurts' WBZ....or, at the minimum, it sure doesn't help. Given that,let's go green and save some electricity by turning off the HD feed on the AM side. Nobody's listening.
That being said, in order to accommodate WBZ's HD signal, their analog signal has been compressed into a narrower bandwidth. The net result of this is that WBZ's audio sounds flat and listless. Even the sound levels appear to be lower. Flip back and forth between WBZ and a non-IBOC station like WRKO and you'll hear what I mean. WRKO sounds like FM when compared with the crap audio now heard on WBZ. Whether that lousy audio has driven a few listeners away is hard to say....but it sure hasn't added any.
Now, WBZ (AM) is also offered on 98.5 HD-3. That feed is advantageous to CBS Radio. Yes, the technology is still crap and the HD-2+ signals are still full of drop-outs as you move around, but at least there is some value that can be gleaned from it. The AM feed is useless in that nobody is listening to it, it spreads interference over an appallingly wide slice of the spectrum (damaging other properties), and it results in a station's analog signal having to be compressed and hence sounding flat.
And don't try to argue that WBZ's analog audio doesn't sound like crap, because it does. And it has ever since they fired up the exciter.
That's how it potentially 'hurts' WBZ....or, at the minimum, it sure doesn't help. Given that,let's go green and save some electricity by turning off the HD feed on the AM side. Nobody's listening.
BRNout said:
No argument here.
I sent an email to Mark the other day asking him when is WBZ finally going to shut down IBOC since it is now a known fact that AM IBOC is a failure, that even Tom Ray seems to agree and he never answered me. In the past when I've sent him emails about interference, very limited range and lousy analog (And HD) sound he's written me back extolling the virtues of iBlock, no positive rah rah mail this time.
BRNout said:
WBZ is the #1 station in Boston. It doesn't need any help. It's already beating everyone else. So the idea that they're using HD to help is fatuous.
But if a station sounds like "crap," as you say, and is still beating FM stations in the ratings, and still beating stations that don't use HD, doesn't that say something about the argument that a station that WBZ is being hurt because it sounds like "crap?"
WRKO may sound "better" than WBZ, but it has less than half of the listeners. So telling WBZ they could do better by using WRKO as an example doesn't help your case.
Most of you folks are engineers. Your goal is to make audio sound the best it can possibly be. But the fact of the matter is that quality sound isn't always a priority for listeners. That's hard to stomache, but it's the truth. So the sound quality argument really isn't quantifiable in terms of the fact that matters most, and that's in the ratings.
Just because W-BuZz does well in the ratings due to quality content, it doesn't mean that the station couldn't do even better with a quality signal. The self-interference and narrow bandwidth from IBOC do not help them. CBS, wake up!
local oscillator said:
They don't need to do better. They're #1. That's my point. And stations without HD are all doing worse.
Don't misunderstand this to be a pro-HD post. That's not at all what I'm saying. Just that using sound quality isn't a valid argument to a commercial radio station that's #1 in the ratings. If they wanted to improve their sound quality, they'd simply give up the frequency and move to FM. Sound quality is not the motivation. Stick to arguments that matter. This one doesn't.
BigA, your argument doesn't hold water. WBZ is #1 IN SPITE of its deficient signal -- due to other factors, mainly content and heritage.
The goal of all serious, competitive commercial broadcasters is(and should be) to maximize listening and, therefore, ratings and revenue. Being #1 is nice, being all you can be is far better. Reaching that goal is comprised of many components: quality content, quality marketing and promotion, quality community service and involvement, and . . . a quality signal.
WBZ "being all it can be" means maximizing its operation on 1030 kHz. What we're talking about are the detrimental effects of IBOC on AM broadcasting, not hypothetical operation on FM, high bandwidth streaming, or anything else.
The goal of all serious, competitive commercial broadcasters is(and should be) to maximize listening and, therefore, ratings and revenue. Being #1 is nice, being all you can be is far better. Reaching that goal is comprised of many components: quality content, quality marketing and promotion, quality community service and involvement, and . . . a quality signal.
WBZ "being all it can be" means maximizing its operation on 1030 kHz. What we're talking about are the detrimental effects of IBOC on AM broadcasting, not hypothetical operation on FM, high bandwidth streaming, or anything else.
That's right. It's defective logic to argue that just because a station is #1 and runs IBOC that HD isn't "hurting" them. You can't prove that any more than I can prove (with any degree of certainty) that HD noise is driving away listeners. You can't have it both ways.
However, 43 years of industry experience including half my adult life as an AM owner-operator, builder of four directional arrays, etc., etc., combined with common sense indicates that HD is very likely hurting AM radio. It has dramatically ramped up interference, especially at night. 50kw flamethrowers are annihilating each other - particularly in the winter. Anyone with even a slightly broadband receiver gets co-channel self-interference hiss while listening to an HD-equipped AM. There are multiple cases of local 50kw AMs which have lost in-market daytime coverage because of funky things being done in the RF system. The analog and digital do NOT play well together - even in high-power NDA systems. You need a combination of antenna characteristics which generally don't exist in the real world of AM broadcasting to make HD work, and compromises are constantly being forced. The results suck.
Then there's the lousy analog audio quality. HD boosters argue that narrow-bandwidth receivers make the issue moot. I disproved that through field experience. Everyone could hear the difference on our station with the change from 6 khz to 10 khz. And these were not trained broadcast engineers or audiophiles, either.
HD zealots argue that isolated AM success stories indicate that listeners don't care about audio. Then they trash and denigrate AM radio because of poor quality as they lecture everyone that AM has missed the boat because operators didn't rush to "embrace' HD. Which is it? Does audio matter or doesn't it? Irrespective of your answer, logic dictates HD must be rejected. HD's argument amounts to "we must make AM sound like crap to make AM sound better." It's asinine.
However, 43 years of industry experience including half my adult life as an AM owner-operator, builder of four directional arrays, etc., etc., combined with common sense indicates that HD is very likely hurting AM radio. It has dramatically ramped up interference, especially at night. 50kw flamethrowers are annihilating each other - particularly in the winter. Anyone with even a slightly broadband receiver gets co-channel self-interference hiss while listening to an HD-equipped AM. There are multiple cases of local 50kw AMs which have lost in-market daytime coverage because of funky things being done in the RF system. The analog and digital do NOT play well together - even in high-power NDA systems. You need a combination of antenna characteristics which generally don't exist in the real world of AM broadcasting to make HD work, and compromises are constantly being forced. The results suck.
Then there's the lousy analog audio quality. HD boosters argue that narrow-bandwidth receivers make the issue moot. I disproved that through field experience. Everyone could hear the difference on our station with the change from 6 khz to 10 khz. And these were not trained broadcast engineers or audiophiles, either.
HD zealots argue that isolated AM success stories indicate that listeners don't care about audio. Then they trash and denigrate AM radio because of poor quality as they lecture everyone that AM has missed the boat because operators didn't rush to "embrace' HD. Which is it? Does audio matter or doesn't it? Irrespective of your answer, logic dictates HD must be rejected. HD's argument amounts to "we must make AM sound like crap to make AM sound better." It's asinine.
local oscillator said:
In any case, IBOC isn't hurting them. So move on to another argument.
The rest of your post is speculative at best. WBZ doesn't care about their signal reaching beyond the DMA because that's all that's measured by Arbitron, and all they sell to advertisers. So they are maximizing their operation in terms of what a radio station operating under the current FCC parameters allows. IF the FCC would rescind a few thousand AM licenses, and allow 50K stations to operate the way they did 50 years ago, it would be a different discussion.
Savage said:
Would you mind recapping your experience, Savage? I must have missed it the last time.
My experience has been the opposite. We are radio nerds, for lack of a better term, and thus gravitate towards better AM receivers. The "average consumer" has a radio with 4 or 5 kHz brickwalled. I've sat in enough new cars at showrooms and played with enough of my friends' aftermarket radios and toyed with all the shelf systems at electronics stores to know that our 10 kHz+ experiences are a small minority compared to the garbage that's out there.
I've heard IBOC stations in a handful of markets on a handful of portable and car stereos and frankly, a majority of them had little to no hash on the analog signal. MY car stereo is the exception, as is my AMAX Walkman. Ye olde boombox, the home stereos, the portable SW receiver, and two other car stereos in the household show little to any hash/noise on HD stations.
In addition to WBZ being #1 despite HD, I can add another solid AM performer to that list: WDIA Memphis. It's the "heritage black music station" in the city and has been anywhere from #1 to #5 consistently as long as I've watched their ratings, 12+.
Playing music.
With IBOC.
If ever there were a combination of disastrous results, that should be it, but it isn't.
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