Are you listening over the air or on the stream? Streams often add extra ads in stopsets that make them longer than over the air. For example at my station what is normally a 3 minute stop set on the air is often 4 or 5 minutes long on the stream putting that listener behind the over the air experience. After listening for as little as a half hour or 45 minutes you can easily end up that far behind.
That would cause delays to grow to absurd lengths if listeners remained connected for long periods of time.
They are probably using an audio buffering device that works in the opposite fashion of a profanity delay. I know they exist, but can't remember their names. But basically, rather than slowing down the audio until a certain number of seconds get buffered internally, after which the audio resumes its normal playback speed, these specific other devices I'm referring to -- when triggered -- stop outputting anything at all until a certain number of seconds have buffered up. Then, they begin playing the buffer at a
faster than normal speed, until the output catches up with the input, at which point they become simple pass-through devices. A station using one of these can switch away from its output (during its silent period) to insert audio from another source, like an extra commercial.
Stations commonly used these boxes back in the day on syndicated talk shows like Rush Limbaugh's. They allowed those stations to forcibly lengthen Rush's (and other hosts') commercial breaks so more local spots could be inserted. Rush had a fit over them, because in addition to just playing back their buffered audio faster than normal, they tended to seek out and completely remove all pauses from speech, which Rush claimed changed the meaning of his words, on the logic that pauses existed to communicate emphasis and so on.
Anyway, the station OP is referring to might be using one of those on its stream to lengthen its commercial breaks without the resulting delays building up over the long term. (I seem to recall that the name of at least one of the box models that did this was something silly, like "PROPHET" or "CASH". Maybe someone around here remembers.)
