Ashamed to be on AM

[radio]

Get it out and enjoy it! Those capacitors age, whether it's used or not....We buy used Carvers to serve up our stereo AM stream to listeners, promoting the quality of AM signals when properly transmitted!

A carver, like any electronics can be likened to your "best china." You don't use the china because it may break, and you end up never enjoying it. Better to get out the Carver, USE it, ENJOY it, and let it age being used if still operable. Don't let a classic piece of equipment sit without being used. It's components are aging in the box! (Especially the caps which go bad and affect the sound.) You may as well enjoy it rather than have someone sell it at your estate sale some year!

 

[overtimeman]

When I finally got my first smart phone (IPhone5s) a friend told me about the TuneIn Radio app and was surprised that all of the AM stations that was popular back in the 70's most was still broadcasting in my area.Yes most had changed their formats but still I had forgot about them for decades.Then when I got the FireTV Stick from Amazon and fired up the app on it those few stations I used to listen to then are broadcast crystal clear and sound good through my Sony 2 channel sound system.My favorite station that broadcast southern gospel 24/7 is still at it forty years later.I have the Roku with the tunein radio app but their unit does not support all formats that some FM stations utilize and no AM stations at all.

 

[radio]

The Tune-in Radio app and the "no AM" are a coincidence. The BEST form of streaming available today in bandwidth use vs. sound quality is AAC+. Tune-in on the rokus does NOT support this, but most smart-TV's do support the format. I know, because I stream in AAC+ wouldn't have it any other way...beats MP3 for sound quality hands-down! I wish the ROKU did support the AAC+. Nice, however to catch some great stations on a smart TV attached to a good sound system.

 

[Mr Tony]

Interesting because there are a bunch of AM stations on the tunein app that I see....including one station in the UP of Michigan (590 Ironwood) that has good country and polkas

I've seen more stations drop the tune in app to have their own "app" that they want you to download on your phone. I know KCHK use to be on tune in...but now most of the stations owned by same folks (Ingstad brothers) are online only or the phone app

 

[lfp302]

Since this thread began, 850 KOA Denver has added a simulcast of its News/Sports/Talk format to 94.1 fm. I'm sick of hearing them brag aout it.

 

[overtimeman]

When I was in high school back in the early 70's WOWO from Fort Wayne Indiana was the one AM station that was rock solid without all the flutter that AM stations had in common at night.That was a pretty good signal considering I was in upstate South Carolina.Yep when I posted in the Roku forums about one local FM station that wasn't listed they did respond that it used the AAC+ format which Roku didn't support.Like I mentioned before back then AM stations was all about local programming now they use a national feed.It was the Roku that didn't have any AM stations listed on local feed.The TuneIn app had about as many AM stations as they did FM of course some of them are geared towards the hispanic audience.I was just surprised after forty years to see those call letters where still around.

 

[harshness]

The BEST form of streaming available today in bandwidth use vs. sound quality is AAC+.

Ogg Opus is probably better than AAC+ at low bandwidth levels. It has a similar or worse issue with player support.

As with TV, GIGO is the rule and the more cruft there is in the source material, the more bandwidth required to relay it.

 

[radio]

AAC+ has no ringing, is crystal clear, and adopted well by most hardware and software people now. May be other options, but not if you want to be heard on devices other than a geek's PC. God FORBID people can like mp3 streams. Most have ringing, and are awful! Even the big corporate broadcasters haven't figured that out yet, but...they never claimed to care about the sound of their stations, either.

Disagree on the bandwidth for crud. Program suppliers like WION pay for a certain level of bandwidth, in our case both AAC+, one stream at 48k, one at 128k, listener choice on most players. While the number IS "averaged"...it is also limited and "capped" in how much we can have per listener, and very close to what is stated. You can watch the screen on some 'net radios and the numbers will vary, but, the MAXIMUM is usually well within a (very) small tolerance. It wouldn't matter if I was piping down a thunderstorm on AM or my clear, wonderful AM stereo...the stream doesn't care. It'll be an output of 10khz (average) wide, on a 48k or 128k stream.

 

[harshness]

Of course when it comes to devices (phones, streamers, tablets and soon, watches), decoding is done in hardware so software codecs don't really come into play.

Disagree on the bandwidth for crud.

Perhaps this is because you misunderstood where the cruft was. I was speaking of content that was compromised in the first place. Scratchy records, a fuzzy recording or a poor relay (my local AM station uses an FM setup that is a good fraction as powerful as their AM broadcast antenna but it still flups once in awhile). These artifacts carry through the encoding process and take even more bandwidth because they fight with the encoding algorithms.