Rush gone from WRKO

[Rob Landry]

On Wed, 20 May 2015, Dave Doherty wrote:

> On the other hand, there seems to be pretty good evidence that PPM is 
> inconsistent at best when reporting talk formats. Duty cycle in the 1-3 
> kHz range is what makes PPM work.  You have to have consistent energy in 
> that spectrum before the encoders can add the PPM signal.

I'm skeptical of that. The 1 - 3 KHz range is exactly where most of the 
energy in human speech falls. If anything, talk stations should be favored 
by a system that utilizes this spectrum range.

My gut tells me that at the core of this debate are some broadcasters 
whose programming no longer attracts listeners as well as it used to, and 
who have seized on PPM as a convenient scapegoat. It's not us, they say, 
it's the technology that isn't delivering.

How many times have we found ourselves at a station that isn't reaching 
its audience effectively, and been asked "are you sure the transmitter is 
putting out 100% power?" It's the same phenomenon: there's nothing wrong 
with our programming, the technology must be at fault.

It doesn't help that a certain company is now selling a box they claim 
will cure the alleged problem by enhancing the audibility of the PPM codes 
in your station's signal. And it's only $15,000.

> NPR, with its long pauses and word-swallowing hosts, is particularly
> vulnerable; but human speech - even that of screaming talk show hosts -
> simply does not have the duty cycle of pop music. (For the same reasons,
> classical music and some forms of jazz are also particularly susceptible to
> under-reporting.)

Well, I was at WCRB long enough to have seen Arbitron data from the diary 
and PPM eras. There wasn't much difference. The big change came when 
Arbitron decided to add southern New Hampshire and half of Worcester 
County to the Boston market; everyone's numbers went down when that 
happened. But PPM? WCRB's numbers weren't much different than they were 
with the diaries, but they were a lot more consistent. The diary numbers 
used to bounce up and down a lot more. If PPM was penalizing WCRB for its 
classical format, we didn't see it.


Rob