It's worse than that. Electric cars (Bolt, Leaf, Tesla) generate so much interference that their AM receivers are pretty much useless anyway. Even if the FCC were to mandate AM receivers, as the percentage of electric vehicles increases, the percentage of people getting decent reception will decrease. And, as you note---even with a good audio system like yours, the AM receiver is substandard.
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The ratings are out for los angeles.
- Thread starter hotpatrick2004
- Start date
It's worse than that. Electric cars (Bolt, Leaf, Tesla) generate so much interference that their AM receivers are pretty much useless anyway. Even if the FCC were to mandate AM receivers, as the percentage of electric vehicles increases, the percentage of people getting decent reception will decrease. And, as you note---even with a good audio system like yours, the AM receiver is substandard.
The thing I notice about this conversation about KSUR is no one is talking about the air personalities. Just the music. Radio is a lot more than just a way to hear music. There are many other options for hearing 60 year old songs than AM radio. I know the station has a couple of people who do shows, but no one ever mentions them.
They're kind of wallpaper and also probably voice-tracked.
I'm checking them out. I'm sure they appeal to folks far younger than "80". And hearing 70's music at this time, they are appealing to people in their 50's and older. Yes, SuperRadioFan, this is how an oldies station should sound. Now do me a favor, spread about 100 of these around the country.
I will just stick to my formats of choice alternative rock and chr. Kroq and kiis 102.7.
For a change of pace every now n again i did like the adult standards format sal had but i couldnt take a steady diet of it hence now and again. But that hasnt been an option for a minute.
That is all.
For a change of pace every now n again i did like the adult standards format sal had but i couldnt take a steady diet of it hence now and again. But that hasnt been an option for a minute.
That is all.
Do you know the reasoning behind that decision? I had heard about it before, but information isn't easy to come across.
Random nostalgic moment: I remember my grandparent's 1980 Cadillac landyacht; its AM Stereo radio sounded like a symphony. It kind of describes the KSUR discussion, as back then, my grandparents were listening to 1940s big band music, a format where the audience was quickly dying off.
It was done by the FCC to reduce the interference in the sidebands from adjacent channel stations as the band got more and more congested.
The AM band, when radios were better and the band less crowded and noisy was capable of near FM quality.
Major Armstrong would disagree...primarily in terms of dynamic range. Even when Armstrong was alive, the dynamic range of AM was terrible.
So maybe frequency response was better then, but because of the lack of dynamic range inherent in amplitude modulation, the result was a boomier, bassier sound. This was one of the advantages of Armstrong's discovery.
Worth noting that in today's laradio.com, Saul says K-SURF has gone all-70s on Sunday night and the plan is to "integrate more 70s music into their diet of primarily 50s and 60s music".
Which means he sees the need to skew younger than the station currently does.
Again, take the top 40 target of 12-34 back in the day and factor from there...1970 would be 61-83 now. 1979 would be 52-74.
That's better, but still not a salable demo, which is why KRTH plays what it does.
Saul knows---it's why Classical gave way to Unforgettables on that signal and why Unforgettables has moved to KKJZ's HD. He's sensitive to demos, too.
And just because statistics are fun---the peak KFWB audience from the year before KRLA overtook it (1962)? That'd be 69-91. The folks who were around for the first year of "Color Radio"? 73-95.
You could fix some of that by processing---but by the time the tools became available, the competitive situation was all about 125% modulation.
Armstrong focused on promoting the lack of static and noise on FM and the absence of interference from distant stations via skywave as well as superior building penetration.
While they did roll off a bit more than FM, AM could do +/- 3 db from about 50 to 15,000 Hz.
Dynamic range was intentionally limited to keep the modulation above the noise floor in earlier days. Later, when loudness became a competitive point, neither AM nor FM were concerned by noise floors as both were trying to generate square waves via aggressive audio processing.
Time is flying by, I know that, we know that. It's 2019. Still radio has to find a way to preserve things to some extent for future listeners of these eras. As for K-Surf, is this Sunday 70's, separate from the all disco Saturday Night show?
"Future listeners of those eras" are passing away and in another decade there will be practically no people who grew up on 50's and 60's Top 40 music and those that remain will be in their 80's and beyond.
Radio stations are not museums. We do not make money being curators of aging music of dying generations.
Popular music has been largely ephemeral since before Edison recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into his first "talking machine." Songs gain popularity for a few months, maybe as long as a year, then if they're memorable and catchy enough, they spend the next 50 or so years as nostalgia. Then the people who remember them most fondly start to die off and most of the songs die with them. A very few survive to become what we call standards. Every generation has had the conceit that its music was the best, that nothing will ever surpass it, that future generations will love it as much or more as they will the popular songs of their own generations. False, false and false. The vast majority of the songs of the '50s and '60s will mean no more to future generations than most of the '40s hits of the Mills Brothers, Andrews Sisters and Perry Como do to today's millennials.
The only "timeless" music that survives as a radio format in America today is classical and, to a lesser extent, jazz. Today's classical musicians are still primarily playing music composed between the 16th and mid-20th centuries, and that's what not only th genre's elderly listeners want and expect, it is what younger people who discover the genre want and expect as well. It is the height of generational arrogance to expect the next generation of popular music consumers to reject their own generations' voices for Chuck Berry, the Stones, Aretha Franklin, the Beach Boys, just as it would be for millennials to expect young people 50 or 60 years from now to prefer Ed Sheeran, Cardi B, Kanye or Lady Gaga to their own generation's popular music.
Interesting thread. What do we think are the 'standards' from the 50's and 60's that will survive for generations? I don't dispute the notion that most of the popular songs from this era will die off as we all die off. Still, is there something unique about the 60's that would suggest a longer more permanent place in our culture for this music. Recall Steve Jobs' thought the mid 60's-mid 70's rock music time period to be the musical equivalent of the French Impressionist time period (1870s-1880s).
I wouldn't want to hazard a guess on specific titles, but consider what's happened to some of the biggest artists of the middle of the last century: Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole have had their work boiled down to their Christmas songs. That's pretty much where the Carpenters and Jose' Feliciano are, too---and they're a couple of decades more recent than Nat.
I don't see that happening with the super-star acts of the 60's and 70's. I suspect a few Beatles and Rolling Stones hits will live on for at least for a few decades, and for a select few of their songs. As popular as The Carpenters were....I know they sold tons of records, the Beatles and Stones were much bigger by a wide margin. As far as I can remember, the only big hit Feliciano ever had was his cover of Light My Fire. In fact, Feliz Navidad may have been his second biggest hit.
Even in Oldies radio of the 80's and 90's - you didn't hear many Carpenters songs. I doubt they "tested" well. Hey Jude or Satisfaction...different story.
Honey by Bobby Goldsboro was one of the biggest hits of 1968, but you never heard it on Oldies radio.
Hey. I grew up listening to music in 70s and I’m 55. I’m out of the sales demo and last of the Baby Boomers. I’m hardly dead and no where near 70.
I hestitated before mentioning the Carpenters, afraid that it might be considered unequal to the "legends". So let's look at Elvis. He's pretty well gone from the radio. The Beatles' airplay is a shadow of its former self---even as recently as earlier this decade. The Stones probably have legs as long as they're still touring,
Beyond that? How often are you hearing Dylan or the Beach Boys anymore? Hate to say it, Llew...but by the time you and I are either 90 or gone (whichever comes first), the vast majority of those songs will be too.
Gone from the airwaves (maybe), but preserved forever in the Library of Congress, Online, Internet Radio.....It's our job, to somehow preserve these songs for future generations to enjoy. Someone living in 2119, would be curious as to who the Beatles were and their 20 #1 smashes, who the Queen of Soul is, the success of the Bee Gees in 1978 or maybe an obscure gem such as "Close to You" by the Carpenters. I believe rock and roll will live longer to future gens, than the music of the 20's thru the 40's is doing today.
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