[QUOTE=bigmsound]
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Originally Posted by Dave A
I heard a very interesting talk tonight at our local radio club...the Delaware Valley Historic Radio Club. The CBS radio tech manager for WPHT-AM and WOGL-FM (the old flame-throwing WCAU combo"
"Hot Hits" WCAU-FM I used to pick up WCAU-FM here in Brooklyn, many times throughout the 80's during the evening hours. Yes..I remember Terry "Motormouth" Young on "98 WCAU-FM Flame Throwing Hot Hits"
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I heard Terry "Motormouth" Young on XM Radio's Sixties on Six channel last year, as part of a repeat of a radio program from the mid-'60s featuring a former Cleveland disk jockey of the period, Jackson Armstrong, who used to be on top-40 WKYC-1100 AM (now WTAM talk radio). Motormouth also did a couple segments on that WKYC-AM retrospective. Was a blast hearing these guys and the old WKYC Radio Eleven jingles again; I used to listen to that station all the time when I was growing up and until they were sold from NBC in 1970. The oldies FM that replaced WKYC (FM) 105.7 in 1981(after several ownership, format and callsign changes in between) is WMJI, Majic 105.7, which I still listen to (I like oldies--have a bunch of oldies CDs as well), but it just isn't quite the same as the old WKYC Radio 11. The DJs on 105.7 aren't bad (though I cannot abide one loudmouth with a terrible voice by the name of Don "Action" Jackson, on 105.7 from 3 to seven p.m. weekdays, not to mention the station's morning show which is worse, IMHO), but I listen mostly to the station's overnight program (midnight to 5:30 a.m.) since it is 100 percent automated; it has some commercials, but absolutely no DJ chatter. The rest of the time I listen to my oldies CDs, which I ripped into my computer quite a while ago, or to XM satellite radio Sixties on Six or Seventies on Seven (my Winamp player came bundled with about ten AOL Radio with XM music channels, plus Shoutcast and Winamp radio, so I have very little use for local FM anymore).
Your collection of oldies CDs (or MP3 files downloaded from the Web) and your computer, the latter used with a media player such as Winamp (current version 5.32, IIRC) et al. is a good way, IMO, to hear your favorite oldies again if your area's oldies station changes formats suddenly (as many stations do these days), if you don't have an oldies station in your town, or if the nearest oldies station is so far away the signal doesn't reach you. Your oldies will sound that much better if you play them through your stereo system, rather than using the speakers that came with your computer (which, in many cases, aren't good at all for lows and don't get much help from the equalizer built in to many media players such as Winamp.
) The only reason I'm listening to my music over my computer's own speakers now is that my stereo is presently in for repairs, but I'm picking it up from the shop tomorrow so I'll have my regular music system back in place in no time.
As for using FM radios as tuners in stereo systems: I did that in the early '70s, using an old FM tuner which I patched into the audio stages of a 23" Zenith b&w TV I owned at the time. The set was a console and had a very powerful audio system, with a 6BN6 gated-beam discriminator and 6BQ5 output tube driving a 6x9 oval speaker mounted in the base of the cabinet. The sound was great; I enjoyed it immensely while I had the TV, but unfortunately I had to get rid of it
when I moved in 1972. My Zenith IS-4041 4-mode integrated stereo was my first real stereo system, which I bought new in 1982; I left that one at my former home when I moved to my present apartment seven years ago. I now have an Aiwa 4-mode bookshelf system, 200 total watts, that I swear sounds better than even the first Zenith stereo I had (as well it should, since my Aiwa system has an eight-band equalizer with five user-defined settings and four presets, not to mention 4-mode surround sound), but not as good as the audio from my 1963 Zenith console TV. That set easily had the best audio of any television I have ever heard in my life, except perhaps for the big Magnavox stereo theater consoles of the '60s-'70s and Zenith's older 3-way entertainment combos of the same era. But my '63 Zenith TV (model K2739) had very good sound in its own right, something we may never hear again from today's black-plastic cube sets (unless one hooks them up to a stereo system using the A/V in/out jacks on many large-screen sets). I have the audio output from my digital cable box hooked up to one aux input on the Aiwa stereo and the output from my computer's sound card going into the other. The sound is great, but again, not nearly as good as the sound from those older TVs with huge bass/midrange speakers. I'd love to be able to use external speakers other than the supplied ones with my Aiwa system, but the company warns on its web site against using anything other than genuine Aiwa speakers with these compact systems. The reason, I am fairly sure, is that the woofers are of a nonstandard impedance (six ohms) and the subwoofers and tweeters may be set up the same way. Why Aiwa decided to use 6-ohm speakers, rather than 8 ohms, in its compact systems is beyond me.
