Which sorta brings this up: Why do some stations seemed to sound better 30-50 years ago then they do nowadays? Aside from my aging ears, it would seem like technology today that stations use would make them sound 100 times better than years ago. Cheaper, crappier radios being made today? Stations not maintaining aging infrastructure? Or something else?
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Over the years, it became a loudness battle between the stations. Cutting the highs and lows down and banging everything up through the middle to sound loud. One PD once told me "I don't care so much what we sound like, so long as we are the loudest station on the dial".
L3 is a Waves processing plug in that music (and radio) producers use. It's a compressor/limiter. The software version of a Aphex Compellor. MANY over use it.
IHR stations utilize Voltair. Ruins the audio, among other things.
Open a music file of a song from the 70s; Eagles, Aerosmith, whatever. The file has dynamics, isn't squashed. Arguably a bit "dull". Music then was produced to work WITH radio station processing. Ask Frank Foti or another engineer from that era.
Today it's a loudness "war".... that doesn't need to be. No reason to produce the music as it's done now - for radio - bc today's processors can certainly do the job. They did in 50 years ago, can do. The issue is that the music is squashed today for streaming platforms, that don't have processing. Or for the phone.
Open a music file of a song from the 70s; Eagles, Aerosmith, whatever. The file has dynamics, isn't squashed. Arguably a bit "dull". Music then was produced to work WITH radio station processing. Ask Frank Foti or another engineer from that era.
Today it's a loudness "war".... that doesn't need to be. No reason to produce the music as it's done now - for radio - bc today's processors can certainly do the job. They did in 50 years ago, can do. The issue is that the music is squashed today for streaming platforms, that don't have processing. Or for the phone.
It's a bit more complicated. I've spoken with artists and producers from that era, and they tell me they would take test pressings of their songs to the local radio station late at night. Then they'd go in their car to listen to the song through the processing. They would make adjustments to the mix and compression based on what they heard. But if they were listening to an AM station, it was very different from an FM station. The listening environment in a moving car is different from that of a quiet studio. Music of the 70s and 80s was made to sound good on the radio. They don't do that today.
The only genres of music that aren't squashed are classical and traditional jazz. The legendary engineer Rudy Van Gelder refused to compress his music.
Do all iHeart stations use Voltair? I thought since the official Nielsen encoders were improved a few years ago (after Voltair was introduced and proved it made a difference) Voltair wasn't needed anymore.
I'm told the IHR CLE stations do. WKDD and WHLO do not. Per my source "the latter two sound A LOT better".
Only slightly off topic but hopefully not too far, I find WMJI a really tough listen because of how they sound, clearly speeding up songs. They do not sound natural to me. Maybe other stations do it to a lesser degree, but I find it really distracting and have for years.
Heck, in the old days they used to wrap tape around record player capstans to speed up the 45 a little bit. That way stations could claim that "We play more music per hour than K-JIZZ" or whatever station they were competing against.
Speeding up a song by 2% to 3% reduces the time by about 2 and a half seconds. That does not fit more songs in an hour. What it did was make stations sound a bit brighter and crisper, and that particularly helped AMs.
What we actually did was change electronically the frequency of the AC current that ran the turntable… in the studio or the one used, later, to make dubs to carts.
The tape on the capstan was occasionally used to create character voices for ads or bits. It was too hard to replicate to use for music, as it had a tiny wobble effect where the tape was cut
The first station I worked at, they wrapped tape around the capstan of the turntables. I don't know if somebody bitched or not but came in about 3 weeks later and all the tape had been taken off the capstans and everybody was doing their best Sgt. Schultz impression of "I know NOTHING!" I thought it was sorta sleazy but I wasn't going to be the new guy griping about it. It's the same as when I play the National Anthem at sports games on my computer, the shortest one at a minute 14 seconds and they STILL asked if I could shorten it up. Told them yeah, but YOU can take all the heat from people when they start complaining that they don't like the Alvin & The Chipmunks version.
Sidebar to that story... likely a "sign of the times".
When I lived in Ecuador, it was required to play the national anthem ahead of every sporting event, even school events and on national holidays, at the start of every movie in theaters. We'd all stand, put our hands on our heart, and sing as loudly and proudly as we could.
But one theater chain tried to do a shortened version of the anthem ahead of the feature film. That experiment lasted about 3 hours until the owners could order the full version back into use, as the attendees had after the short version, banged on their theater seats, stomped on the floors and booed at the theater operator quite loudly.
Even though all my stations there ran 24/7, we'd start every day at 6 AM with the anthem anyway. Not required, but we thought our listeners would appreciate it.
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Don't get me started on those disclaimers at the end of a commercial. I have no idea what they are saying as they condense 30 seconds worth of disclaimers down to about 10 seconds.
Remember the QuickHitz format from around 2014 where the consultant edited songs down to approximately half their length, promising twice the music? 
Remember the QuickHitz format from around 2014 where the consultant edited songs down to approximately half their length, promising twice the music?
Are you familiar with TikTok? Creators there edit songs even shorter, and add their own videos to them. It's very popular with young people.
The music industry has been making it easy for TikTokers to edit their songs. They say it helps to promote new music.
TikTok announces agreement with Sony Music Entertainment - Newsroom | TikTok
TikTok is the world's leading destination for short-form mobile videos. Our mission is to capture and present the world's creativity, knowledge, and moments that matter in everyday life. TikTok empowers everyone to be a creator directly from their smartphones, and is committed to building a...
newsroom.tiktok.com
It works because the star of the Tik Tok show is the video clip which is always short, and the music is cut to creatively fit and augment the video that the audience is focused on.
Does it promote the music? Sure. But radio is not Tik Tok and playing partial song clips is not its strength. There's no shortage of people in the business who think they need to reinvent the wheel and try to make radio something it's not, though.
As I always say: Radio is not one thing.