Quote:
Originally Posted by old_tv_nut
Which station was listed as the "beautiful music" station? We used to have a station in Chicago that played what most people would call elevator music. They were also the only station in Chicago that implemented Dolby FM noise reduction, and broadcast a calibration tone briefly every evening. They also had auxiliary programming on a (monaural) subcarrier with topics for doctors, sponsored by pharmaceutical companies.
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The station in Chicago with beautiful music may have been, and this is just a guess, WMAQ-FM (now WRQX-FM) 101.1. The station was operated by NBC at the time ('60s-1986), before the original NBC radio network was disbanded; it was, like most FMs of the '60s-'70s, entirely automated with elevator music.
Many FM stations carried elevator music when they first went on the air (to justify having a license, they had to put something on the air, even if it meant playing tapes over the transmitter), later switching to some other format. Here in northeastern Ohio, most FM stations in Cleveland carried automated elevator music for years before going to live rock formats. The last FM in this area to change from elevator music to rock was WREO-FM in Ashtabula, Ohio, near Lake Erie; it did so in 1990 or '91.
I don't know if any Cleveland FMs broadcast in Dolby at any time during the '70s. I think the classical station at the time (WCLV-FM, 95.5) was the only station that even experimented with Dolby; if it did, the experiments only lasted a short time.