Re: Boston Network Radio Affiliations: 1950's and 1960's.

[Shawn Mamros <mamros@MIT.EDU>]

>Why did former music stations drop the reverb on the microphones when they
>switched to talk?  Personally, the reverb makes a station sound better,
>especially when you're listening to it through the tinny speaker or better
>yet the earphones of  a pocket transistor radio.

You kiddin' me?  Yeah, I could just hear it now, in my mind's ear, David
Brudnoy's voice coming through an old spring reverb - not!

For brief stretches of time (just long enough to do a talk up), with just
one voice behind a mic, reverb sounds good.  But with a talk host constantly
chatting, it would get to be pretty old quick.  And what would you do with
any guests on the show?  Put reverb on their voices too?  That would sound
annoying.  But without it, you'd have a disturbing disparity between the
host's and the guest's voices.  And what about callers?

Besides, I think that, in the minds of most people, reverb is indelibly
associated with "old" Top-40 radio.  That's why the only stations that
continue to use it are oldies stations.

And pocket transistor radios???  Who's still got one of those?  Ever since
the debut of the Sony Walkman (nearly 20 years ago now, right?), portable
radios have had far more fidelity than those old tinny things.

- -Shawn Mamros
E-mail to: mamros@mit.edu

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