• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

WOMC Audio Issue

K

K8PLW

Audio drops out for a fraction of a second. It's very subtle, so brief that some may not even notice. Seems to be random, occurring every minute or so on average.

At first I thought it may be an issue with my vehicle radio, RFI, or something else. Not sure, I don't hear it on any other Detroit-area signals.

Does anyone else hear it? Am I going crazy? :)
 
It's been going on for months, and it's very irritating. Happens on both the analog and HD signal. I listen to WOMC less than ever because of it.

I heard a rumor it is an STL issue, but I cannot confirm that. The issue did not begin until after the station relocated its studio to the same building in Southfield where the other Audacy stations are housed.

So sad that cash-strapped Audacy cannot even properly maintain engineering standards at one of the strongest billers in the Detroit market.

It would not surprise me if the annoying audio hiccups are largely behind WOMC's AQH share erosion in recent months.
 
Interesting, and yes, I've noticed it for quite awhile too. 8-9 months at least.

STL problem was my first thought. Surprised it hasn't been addressed, but as you mentioned I'm aware of Audacy's financial woes.
 
Does the HD 2 and 3 do this? Audacy might have financial issues but somewhere nationwide they should have spare or back up equipment. I am sure they could piece together a whole audio chain from various stations nationwide if needed. Has anyone complained to the station? Is there a (local) engineer that works there daily or does someone drive in from another market? Do they sent composite or audio to the transmitter site? Microwave or Internet?

Being 4 states away, never seen their equipment it is hard to make a good guess, but if I called I would say:

Since it is on both analog and HD I would start with equipment common to both.
 
Audacy has a translator ”trimulcast” in my local market (Greenville-Spartanburg, so much smaller than Detroit) where one of the translators has been horribly over-modulated for weeks. I’ve attempted to reach them about it and never received a response and it’s never been fixed. The active rocker’s HD has been clipping for weeks, no response or resolution.

They’re the ones that are going to lose the listeners…
 
secondchoice said:
Does the HD 2 and 3 do this? Audacy might have financial issues but somewhere nationwide they should have spare or back up equipment. I am sure they could piece together a whole audio chain from various stations nationwide if needed. Has anyone complained to the station? Is there a (local) engineer that works there daily or does someone drive in from another market? Do they sent composite or audio to the transmitter site? Microwave or Internet?
Click to expand...
Has anyone sent a detailed message to their GM or corporate engineering?

If someone wants to be a bit aggressive, put "this letter should be placed in your public file as it concerns operations that are not adequately serving the public".
 
Back in my day an engineer took care of the transmitter and audio chain. Occilliscope, volt meter, and schematics/ manuals could solve most emergencies. Now I would not show up without a laptop, cellphone with data, and lots of connectors and cables.
 
secondchoice said:
Does the HD 2 and 3 do this? Audacy might have financial issues but somewhere nationwide they should have spare or back up equipment. I am sure they could piece together a whole audio chain from various stations nationwide if needed. Has anyone complained to the station? Is there a (local) engineer that works there daily or does someone drive in from another market? Do they sent composite or audio to the transmitter site? Microwave or Internet?

Being 4 states away, never seen their equipment it is hard to make a good guess, but if I called I would say:

Since it is on both analog and HD I would start with equipment common to both.
Click to expand...
Good questions, and no I haven't reached out to the station. It does appear to be present on all their HD subchannnels. Of course I have no idea of how their audio chain is configured. It's a very low level anomaly, and likely goes unnoticed by 95% of their listeners.

After all the discussion here it only seems right to make them aware of the problem. I'll send an email and see what happens.
 
Last year Audacy had problems in Dallas-Fort Worth (market #5) on 100.3, where the audio would constantly skip and pop. The issue happened on both analog and HD, but not the stream or HD subchannels. I reported this to them and it still took them a few months after that to fix the issue. To me, that seems like an awful long time for a top 10 market.

Although it apparently didn’t bother most other people, the station was totally unlistenable to me.
 
chriscervantez said:
Last year Audacy had problems in Dallas-Fort Worth (market #5) on 100.3, where the audio would constantly skip and pop. The issue happened on both analog and HD, but not the stream or HD subchannels. I reported this to them and it still took them a few months after that to fix the issue. To me, that seems like an awful long time for a top 10 market.

Although it apparently didn’t bother most other people, the station was totally unlistenable to me.
Click to expand...
"Skip, pop" is a great way to describe this issue as well. I did email the station, no response as of yet. BTW I lived in the Metroplex for about four years (North Richland Hills) and listened to 100.3 regularly, when it was KRBV. They rebranded as Jack FM and became KJKK shortly before I left and moved back to Michigan.
 
MarkW said:
The issue did not begin until after the station relocated its studio to the same building in Southfield where the other Audacy stations are housed.
Click to expand...
They’ve been there for many years. If you’re saying the problem started months ago when they moved there, I’m not sure about that.
 
MarkW said:
So sad that cash-strapped Audacy cannot even properly maintain engineering standards at one of the strongest billers in the Detroit market.
Click to expand...
Audacy doesn't seem to be able to maintain proper engineering standards anywhere.... our local KZJK and KMNB here in Minneapolis are both Audacy owned and both have issues with the Stereo L/R audio balance. KZJK is more noticeable, and if I remember correctly it is the left channel that is seemingly always a few dB lower than the right channel. One morning I was listening to KZJK and heard a weird pop followed by static over the music (it wasn't anything reception related, it was very obvious that it was something in the audio chain) followed by another pop and the audio was back to normal. (aside from the Stereo balance issue) The pop reminded me of the noise made when you plug in/unplug an RCA cable, which makes me wonder if they are using RCA or some form of unbalanced audio cables in their audio chain....
 
In my market, Audacy also removed the station name/calls from the HD of one of their stations when they turned on the HD subchannels (the HD2 has always just been dead air since they turned it on and they're only using the HD3). The HD display? "HD -HD", no station name or calls, it used to show "WROQ-HD" as it should have. HD audio level is almost half of the analog audio level. Yep, I've contacted them about that as well. The engineering at the entire cluster is a mess.

iHeart, Cumulus, Saga, Beasley, and other companies' stations who I hear OTA quite often always sound a million times better than Audacy's, and are quite consistent.
 
RadioGuy1019 said:
The pop reminded me of the noise made when you plug in/unplug an RCA cable, which makes me wonder if they are using RCA or some form of unbalanced audio cables in their audio chain....
Click to expand...
Nearly all major stations in major markets don't use analog audio in their studios any more. Consider that devices are likely connected just the way your wired internet is... not the way your 70's stereo was.
 
K8PLW said:
"Skip, pop" is a great way to describe this issue as well. I did email the station, no response as of yet. BTW I lived in the Metroplex for about four years (North Richland Hills) and listened to 100.3 regularly, when it was KRBV. They rebranded as Jack FM and became KJKK shortly before I left and moved back to Michigan.
Click to expand...
Here’s what the audio on 100.3 Jack FM (KJKK) in DFW sounded like, if you’re curious. You can hear the first skip/pop 15 seconds in and the second 25 seconds in.

 
Years ago I had an intermittent STL issue that was doing something similar. Damn near drove me to drink. The symptom was a random audio pop, the STL receiver would mute, then the audio would return a second later. The TX site was about an hour drive away, and this happened so randomly, that it took much longer than I'd like to admit to troubleshoot. I finally told the GM I needed to spend the following two days at the transmitter site in a effort to catch what's going on. I literally sat there looking at the STL receiver for hours when I saw it; the signal meter would start to climb above the normal receive level until it pinned at the top of the scale. About the time the signal pinned, the receiver couldn't decode the stream anymore and "POP". I grabbed my spectrum analyzer and started looking at the IF into the receiver. Just before the receiver unlocked, I saw another very hot carrier come up right next to our STL frequency, and literally crawl 5MHz right over the top of our incoming signal, then disappear.
Grabbed the yagi and started walking around the site compound and caught it coming from a building right next to ours. Come to find out, it was a 800 MHz land mobile link amplifier that was getting RF turn-around from another link transmitter. When both transmitters came up at the same time, that caused a spurious mix that was right on top of our STL.
In the end I spent probably ten days up on the mountain solving this problem.
 
It honestly just sounds like an underpowered PC trying to playback audio while other tasks are competing for CPU or drive access cycles. That, or network congestion trying to access remote files.

Audio compression on that station sounds awful if the recording is a true representation.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom