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Whats with channel 49?

F

flytrap

They have changed the format again, no more LAT network. and its back to English with Retrojams. Its just like "The Tube" but with nothing but old 70's and 80's music video. Looks like MTV used to look. Lots of great moldy oldies I haven't seen in a long time. Madonna, Inxs, Rick James, Queen, Chic, the Buggles, Blondie, and I even saw Abba. Kinda cool actually.

I think this staion is run by Equity Broadcasting which runs the new Retro Television network, which is kinda like a free version of TV Land (except it doesn't broadcast crap like TV land has been doing lately) It would be nice if they would add Retro-TV to Jackson. Signal is decent at my house but not in HD. Ok I'm done with the low power TV, go ahead and start bashing me.
 
I just tuned in and they just played the video to "She Bop" by Cyndi Lauper and it was in very poor quality. Imagine standing in the hallway outside of the gymnasium at the school dance and hearing the music through the wall. That's what it sounded like. Also, they played a commercial for the Gold Kit afterward and the audio and video were way off. You can see the announcer's lips moving, but wasn't matching what he was saying.
 
I noticed that the audio was out of sync also, it was in sync the first day I noticed the new format. some of the the video is really terrible. It looks like they were copies from a bad tape, some of them such as the Paula Abdul video looked like a really low resolution 320 x 240 with lots of jaggies like a cellphone video. It's been mostly old 80's video, but I've seen quite a bit of 70's classic rock like Led Zeppelin.
 
flytrap said:
I noticed that the audio was out of sync also, it was in sync the first day I noticed the new format. some of the the video is really terrible. It looks like they were copies from a bad tape, some of them such as the Paula Abdul video looked like a really low resolution 320 x 240 with lots of jaggies like a cellphone video. It's been mostly old 80's video, but I've seen quite a bit of 70's classic rock like Led Zeppelin.
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I saw the Paula Abdul video tonight and it looked like something that came straight off of YouTube. They also played a Billy Ocean video and it looks as if it was copied from MTV since it had MTV's character fonts on the opening credits.
 
Funny. I noticed that too! And they play the same videos over and over and they are in the same order. "Humpty Dance" always comes on right after "Jump Around" by House of Pain. and to makes matters worse, only one channel of the audio is playing. On a song by "Free" the guitar solo is missing. On "California Dreaming" by the Mamas and Papas, you can hear only the "Mama's". The "Papas" are moving their lips but you can't hear them, because they are supposed to be on the other speaker.
 
I may be wrong but didn't MTV produce a lot of their own videos back in the day? If so maybe they sold the rights to them eventually.
 
It sounds like they are only feeding the left or right channel of their audio into the transmitter, that would explain the loss or some audio (such as the mamas and papas song).
 
jo-nathan said:
I may be wrong but didn't MTV produce a lot of their own videos back in the day? If so maybe they sold the rights to them eventually.
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No they didn't. Even if they did, they can't sell the rights. The rights stay with the song writer/performer.
 
musiconradio.com said:
It sounds like they are only feeding the left or right channel of their audio into the transmitter, that would explain the loss or some audio (such as the mamas and papas song).
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That's one of my big "audio" pet peeves, and it seems practically every AM left playing music does it. :mad:
 
your right, It drives me crazy too. Its really bad on oldies because some songs had that wide split track seperation. Some songs would have mostly vocals on one channel and music on the other. Or have the ping pong effect. I've noticed AM stations doing that alot too. WIIN used to be bad about that. Aren't there engineers who are supposed to notice this stuff? Judging by the way some to these television and radio stations sound these days you'd think that they are completely deaf. If I notice this stuff, why can't a trained engineer notice it? Its obvious that some of these station operators are not even listening to their own station.
 
flytrap said:
Aren't there engineers who are supposed to notice this stuff?
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No offense meant to any one specific person... But engineers, from my limited experience, are the most tin-eared bunch in radio. :p

For every one I've met who knows the kind of sound that he wants and knows how to get it, there's 2-3 others that couldn't tell AM from FM from XM from SACD by listening to their output.

I actually called up the cluster engineer for Dick Broadcasting in Birmingham years ago when they upgraded the stations to music-on-HDD storage. I complained about the artifacting, which was very very noticeable. The guy told me the stations sounded the same they always have, it must be my radio, there is no problem, etc. It wasn't until later that I learned the ins and outs of MPEG lossy audio compression, and that the 3 stations that sounded bad had just converted to a networked music system.

Ironically, it frustrated me so much that I quit listening to those three stations, which had been my favorites. I became very anti-lossy compression, yet now I've got XM, DirecTV and tons of internet streams that I listen to -- instead of radio.

I fought the compression and the compression won. Audio today is just an afterthought. Even in radio. :(
 
I almost refuse to listen to y-101 or rock 93.9 for the simple reason that the audio is horrible. Sometimes they sound like one of these little 500 watt AM stations that is trying to squeeze every bit of volume they can just to get above the static in the fringe area. But on FM the static is not a problem. Regardless of the audio level, the signal strenght is the same. It just sounds bad when everything is pushed into the red, and processed to death. I can understand a little compression but its just way too much. Lex and Terry on 93.9 sound like they are eating the microphone and yelling even when they are not.( plus their show stinks). Another dishonerable mention is 96.3, which has somewhat improved lately, but still not perfect. SL 100 in Hattisburg has that overmodulated sound during Steve and DC. Actually one of the better sounding stations in Jackson in my opinion is WTWZ 1120. He upgraded his equipment and the bluegrass sounds really smooth now. Even the banjos sound less twangy as before. The station doesn't have that blaring "AM" sound that is so common. If it were in Stereo and played on some good speakers it might even be near FM quality.
 
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