Today I was running around Douglasville and Dallas. I thought I would listen to some AM radio. I happened upon two stations that I liked. WKNG-AM, Tallapoosa and WXFO, Douglasville.
WKNG -- Full service AM radio station. Jingles, news, DJs and country music. Good signal and quality sound. I hope this station is making money. It is a fine example of community radio.
WXJO -- A 1000 watt daytimer that was moved from south Georgia to Douglasville. The station's tower is shared with WDCY. The station is playing some really great music. An oldies format that I would listen regularly if the audio was listenable. The station is obviusly automated and is back-to-back music except a station ID every fifteen minutes. The audio does not seem bad at first but after a little while it became annoying. When I was about 18 years old, Jay Braswell described audio like this causes listener ear fatigue. The audio is highly compressed, even for an AM station and they I bet are pushing a near constant 100% modulation. If I am not mistaken the company that owns WXJO is just in the business to build out the station and find a buyer... sort of like the company that put 1690 AM (now WMLB) on the air. If that is the case, the audio makes sense. They are not really interested in having listeners right now. The highly compressed near 100% constant modulation is like a display piece in a retail store. The current audio processing covers some static and probably makes the station appear to have a slightly larger coverage area. Now... on the other hand it could be they did not bother to pay an engineer enough to set up the audio correctly or they put in an old/cheap audio processor.
WKNG -- Full service AM radio station. Jingles, news, DJs and country music. Good signal and quality sound. I hope this station is making money. It is a fine example of community radio.
WXJO -- A 1000 watt daytimer that was moved from south Georgia to Douglasville. The station's tower is shared with WDCY. The station is playing some really great music. An oldies format that I would listen regularly if the audio was listenable. The station is obviusly automated and is back-to-back music except a station ID every fifteen minutes. The audio does not seem bad at first but after a little while it became annoying. When I was about 18 years old, Jay Braswell described audio like this causes listener ear fatigue. The audio is highly compressed, even for an AM station and they I bet are pushing a near constant 100% modulation. If I am not mistaken the company that owns WXJO is just in the business to build out the station and find a buyer... sort of like the company that put 1690 AM (now WMLB) on the air. If that is the case, the audio makes sense. They are not really interested in having listeners right now. The highly compressed near 100% constant modulation is like a display piece in a retail store. The current audio processing covers some static and probably makes the station appear to have a slightly larger coverage area. Now... on the other hand it could be they did not bother to pay an engineer enough to set up the audio correctly or they put in an old/cheap audio processor.
