Re: WRKO thoughts on the 4th Wknd.

[mwaters@wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

        First, as a baying hound who has criticized WRKO for its previous
July 4th programming efforts, I want to say that I enjoyed this year's. It
was 10,000 times better than what they did before. Just hearing Arnie
Ginsberg made it worthwhile. I also appreciated the comments by Kevin
Straley, the program director, about the past years' programming that
someone posted here.

>Bump Martin wrote:
>Funny, I don't remember WRKO ever _having_ echo in the audio chain
>during it's heyday.  On WMEX and WVBF....I *do* remember echo..... .
        My memory of reverb on Boston stations is that WMEX had lots of
reverb (someone said the opposite). I remember WMEX as using heavy reverb.
They also had a button the DJ would push to go into super echo-chamber mode
when he wanted to emphasize a few words. WBZ had a small amount of reverb
at different times in the '60s and in fact had it relatively recently,
i.e., maybe up to the change to all news/talk in the '90s. I remember WRKO
as using no reverb, although maybe they had a little at first. By the early
'70s, however, I'm pretty sure they had none. The Big 68 website has
airchecks that probably settle that question. Someone's post about reverb
helping a station's sound on two-inch transistor radio speakers is, I
think, on the mark in terms of how the idea got started. It made a station
sound "big" and lively.

>Bump Martin wrote:
>To me, the music sounded pretty good.  Made me wonder about all the
>hallabllou about the "quality" of music on AM and if it is more of a
>'mental thing'....than reality.

        The engineering department of the newsgroup may jump in on this,
but my understanding is that there are two basic problems with audio
quality on AM. One is the narrower bandwidth for the transmission (compared
to FM), and the other is the low quality of most of the receivers. If you
listen to an old radio from the 1930s, it sounds warm and mellow. Most
radios that are made now have inferior AM sections compared to the FM
section in the same radio. A third thing, which can't be controlled, is the
interference to AM from lightning and all sorts of other electrical
sources. For the public, that's always been an issue. In the early days of
FM its promoters talked it up as "static-free," presenting that as FM's
most important improvement. Remember, there was no stereo on FM for many
years. A fourth factor is the signal capture/reject tendency on FM, where
you usually get only one signal at a time. Even weak signals you probably
won't listen to sound "better" on FM. On AM, it's common to get two, three,
or more stations all jumbled on top of each other. Congress and the FCC are
partly to blame here, of course, because of the ridiculous overloading of
the AM band, but that's for another post (and luckily, they seem busy now
overloading the FM band, so maybe they're done overloading the AM band).
The main point is that the public came to identify AM with static and
interference.
        I had WRKO on over the holiday on the GE Superadio III, with the AM
wideband switch on, cranked up, and it sounded great, 40-50 miles from the
antenna. If all AM radios sounded that good and AM stereo was brought out
in the 1960s, the evolution of the two bands might have turned out
differently.

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