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Although audio is my main interest, radio comes in as a close second. Radio predates electronic audio and much of audio’s technology has come out of radio. I’ve stumbled across the site Arcane Radio Trivia and have found it so interesting that I have read every one of its posts, starting from April 2005. It is written by Jose Fritz (I suspect a pseudonym) who apparently has a career in the radio business. Jose also contributes record reviews to the Stranded in Stereo site.

Arcane Radio Trivia covers all aspect of radio imaginable: from technology, history, radio personalities, books about radio, to what stations Jose has heard on his frequent road trips. His views echo mine: skepticism of the growth of corporate radio, support of independent local stations, and heavy skepticism of the FCC and NAB (National Association of Broadcasters). The postings seem quickly written and often have spelling or grammatical mistakes, but the content is fresh, and he posts nearly every weekday! There are often week-long tutorials or history lessons and many good links to other sites. Sample some of his archives and I’d bet you will find yourself wanting to read “just one more posting”.

Its been too long since the last posting - I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m still here, just side-tracked with various non-audio projects. One of my other interests is short-wave and ham radio, and I’ve been working on some radio projects over the last few months. The biggest one was a restoration of a Hammarlund BC-1004 receiver that I bought on ebay and picked-up in Knoxville, Tenn. on my April cross-country trip. This is a World War 2 military version of the SP-200 “Super-Pro” receiver, has 18 tubes, and covers 540Kc to 20Mc in five bands. With its huge power supply and 12″ speaker, it occupies a 3 foot high rack cabinet, and must weigh at least 200 pounds! I’ve restored a similar Hammarlund receiver before, but it still took a while to get everything right, since virtually all the paper capacitors and some of the mica capacitors, as well as about 1/3rd of the resistors needed replacing, and many are buried inside the IF cans and RF tuning unit. Once all the components were good and it was aligned, it is amazingly sensitive! This, despite the fact that it is a conservative design using rather old-fashioned (even for WW2) tubes, such as the 6K7, 6L7, etc. Its main drawback is poor frequency stability, making it pretty useless for SSB. However, for medium-wave and shortwave broadcast stations, it is a pleasure to use.

An audio-related note on the Super-Pro is this fragment of the schematic showing the audio amplifier stage:

Several things are note-worthy here: fixed-bias on the first two stages, medium/low-mu triodes, interstage transformer, and all-triode output stage. This is pretty good for a military receiver, which normally uses (in WW2) something like a 6SQ7 high-mu triode and a 6K6GT or 6V6GT single pentode, much like a cheap table radio. The reason for the better-than-average audio stage is probably because the SP-200 was originally designed as Hammarlund’s top-of-the-line ham radio receiver in 1939, and good audio quality was considered a selling feature in those days.

Another project that has been keeping me busy is a major overhaul of the heating and air-conditioning system at my house. The house was built in 1977 and still has its (mostly) original oil-furnace, freon air central air conditioning, as well as an oil-fired hot water heater. With oil prices rising and the summer air-conditioning electric costs getting pretty high, I am taking it all out and replacing it with a “geo-source” heat exchanger-based system. Several thousand of feet of HDPE tubing is buried six feet in the ground, and a water/methanol mixture is circulated through it to a heat exchanger, where a heat pump either pumps heat out of the ground (in the winter) or into the ground (in the summer). The earth thus acts as a large heat-sink. Electric power is used to run the heat-exchanger compressor and blowers, but the overall energy costs are quite low. By getting rid of heating-oil, I’ll be better prepared for a future with expensive oil and natural gas. In any case, there is a lot of preparation to do - cleaning up the basement, marking out a 200′ by 12′ hole to dig, putting in new electrical wiring, etc. Professionals are doing most of this, but it still has been busy here.

I’ll try to increase the posting activity. Lynn has been pretty busy with his extensive thread at the diy audio forum, but I’m hoping some of his posts come this way. His “Beyond the Ariel” thread is highly recommended!

The Tuner Information Center is the best place on the web to find out information on hifi tuners. The tuners covered are primarily FM Stereo tuners available in America, but vintage mono and AM tuners are also covered. This site is run in an interesting way - it has a “panel of experts” that reviews the tuners. The heart of the site are mini-reviews of solid-state tuners, sorted alphabetically by manufacturer. There is a separate page for tube tuners, with not as deep coverage. However, the real value in the site are all the sections and links to things like alignment, antennas, repair info, modifications, ebay crooks, etc. Most of this information are links to other sites, but the sum total is quite comprehensive. Check it out!

I’m a big fan of preserving equipment data and technological history, so when I came across Harold Hallikainen’s Broadcast History site, I knew it was going to be “notable”! Its slogan “Saving History from the Dumpster” especially resonated with me, since I have literally pulled data from dumpsters! Primarily oriented towards American radio and television broadcasting, it also include links to many other historically interest sites.

An interesting aspect of Broadcast History is that it is in the form of a wiki, which allows additions and corrections to be made by anyone on the net. In the largest wiki, Wikipedia, this has led to some vandalism and politically-motivated postings, but for a subject, like historical broadcasting, where most of the combatants are dead, this isn’t much of a problem. Check it out, and add information if you can.

It wasn’t that long ago I was writing that even the lowest-grade lossy-compression digital is automatically considered “CD-quality” by marketers and the public. Exhibit A: Radio’s Big Leap, in the Denver Post. Here’s a sample:
“Everyone’s switching over now,” said Carlos Lando, program director at KUVO/89.3-FM, the first local station to go hi-def, nearly two years ago. “A lot of it is looking for ways to revive sagging audience figures for AM radio, which at this point isn’t even 10 percent of the audience across the country.”

Lando noted that with HD radio, AM sounds like FM and FM sounds CD-quality. He thinks that will win people over, combined with the fact that HD radio cuts out most “multipath” distortion, or signal interference from buildings. And unlike satellite radio, there’s no monthly subscription fee.

About 700 stations, or 6 percent of the 12,000 commercial stations in the U.S., have made the switch. According to iBiquity, the company that created HD radio, 34 stations in Colorado have converted, with more to follow in the coming weeks. A complete list can be found here.

Industry behemoth Clear Channel plans to roll out HD capability - and a massive marketing campaign - at all its local stations on Monday. Denver market manager Mark Remington said HD’s ability to broadcast multiple channels on the same frequency helped attract Clear Channel.
The Denver Post article does not mention that the data rate for the highest-grade channel is 96kbps (on an FM channel), and for AM, an astonishing 32kbps. Think about it - data rates not that different than a dial-up modem. Listened to any Internet audio recently?

As a reminder, the data rate for a standard Red Book CD is 1.4 megabits/second. The 96/24 data rate (the recording-studio standard since the mid-Nineties) is 4.6 megabits/second (for a stereo pair). The new digital-radio system, with Internet-radio data rates and a lossy-compression ratio between 14:1 and 44:1, is being promoted as High Definition Radio.

It’s nice to know the mainstream AES audio-engineers, along with the broadcast community, are always working hard at improving quality, as well as bringing us the finest in programming. Back when I was working at Tektronix, we called this “value engineering” - the management technique that made the Chevrolet Vega and the Ford Pinto the standard of excellence for the world.