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Video Vault | FOX 10 Phoenix - KOY Goes AM Stereo

S

speer360


Starts at 4:42. KSAZ Fox 10 Phoenix has a great Vault upload program. They uploaded a AM Stereo Bit.

"The first shipment of Sony portable AM stereo radios has arrived at retail stores for $94.95, offering a stronger signal than FM for long-distance travelers."
 
Uncle Charlie didn't want a standard system, instead let the market decide. And it did...the market didn't care about AM Stereo, and today it doesn't care about AM. Its value lies in the land under the sticks and the attached FM translator.
 
KOY at 550 sounded great back then without the need for AM stereo. The thing I didn't like about AM stereo was that it didn't remove the static and hiss. You just got to hear it in stereo!
 
DrAkbar said:
Uncle Charlie didn't want a standard system, instead let the market decide.
Click to expand...
You mean Leonard Kahn. He was the main proponent of the "let the marketplace decide" approach, and threatened to sue anyone who backed a single standard for AM Stereo that wasn't his own. Reagan's pro-deregulation FCC chose the marketplace approach for AM Stereo, quadraphonic FM, and teletext, and ruined the chances of all three (although quad was pretty much dead by the early '80s anyway).
 
KilowattKat said:
KOY at 550 sounded great back then without the need for AM stereo. The thing I didn't like about AM stereo was that it didn't remove the static and hiss. You just got to hear it in stereo!
Click to expand...
FM stereo decoding results in your reception's background hiss being 180 degrees out of phase between speakers. So even when listening to mono voice on stereo stations, your reception's white noise is not only in stereo against that mono, it's in the worst kind of stereo.

On my first stereo FM receiver, which had no stereo/mono switch, for stations that were noisy in stereo but clean in mono, I would slowly pull the stereo headphone plug partly out of the jack until the internal contacts created L+R mono. All the loud, out-of-phase white noise would instantly cancel in the jack, creating nice clean "reception." Poor kid's noise reduction algorithm.
 
Didn't KOY eventually go to the Motorola system before pulling out of AM stereo altogether?

As to my experience with it, the only AM stereo receiver I had access to was in the Pontiac 6000 sedan we purchased in the late 1980s and it relied on the Motorola system. The sound quality on the AM stereo stations (mainly KOOL Gold 960 and sometimes on KCWW 1580) was actually pretty good though it heavily accentuated the treble over the bass. But, as noted with FM, you had to have a clear reception of the AM signal before the AM stereo would kick in.
 


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