[BC] AM Stereo Radio Stations (and bottom-line rant)

[Kevin Tekel]

Gary Peterson wrote:
> The above list is incorrect for KKLS in South Dakota.  The station is on
> 920 kHz, not 1700 kHz.  1700 was an expanded band frequency that was
> never utilized.  Format is Jones satellite oldies.  The Motorola stereo
> exciter went T.U. about four years ago.  I never received one letter,
> postcard, e-mail or phone call when the stereo went away.  I decided
> that repairs/replacement was a waste of time/money.  The Arbitron
> numbers were unaffected.

It's nice to see you care more about the bottom line, than about the
quality of your station's transmission.  If you engineer any FM stations,
why not switch them to mono as well?  I doubt anyone will even notice.
A highly-rated FM Adult Contemporary music station in my area was playing
all their music in mono.  After waiting about a month to see if they would
ever switch it back to stereo, I mentioned it to them and was told I was
the first one to complain about the lack of stereo.

Heck, if the bottom is all that matters anymore, I'm really surprised that
so many FM stations still bother to transmit in stereo.  Many of today's
car radios don't have an FM Stereo indicator anymore, and often have such
aggressive stereo-blending (with corresponding roll-off of high
frequencies) that unless people are within very close range of the
transmitter, they're already listening to FM radio in narrowband mono
anyway. 

This is exactly why IBOC has already crashed even before it gets off the
ground, and why today's radios are only giving us ~3 kHz mono on AM and
~8 kHz mono on FM: because as long as their favorite station is audible
and mostly intelligible, the average listener couldn't care less about
whether or not they're hearing it in "CD-quality" digital stereo sound. 
And this is just as applicable to the digital world as it is to
old-fashioned analog radio.  Just take a look in a typical XM or Sirius
online message board.
Listeners will bitch about the signal dropping out when they drive under
trees, but they'll almost never bitch about the poor audio processing or
hideous-sounding digital codec artifacts.  Heck, most of them are
listening to it through an FM modulator, so the quality will never be
better than analog radio anyway!

Anyway, thanks for your update.  And if you're tired of keeping that
C-Quam exciter as rack ballast, I know plenty of people who would be more
than willing to take it off your hands, regardless if it's currently
functional or not.



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