What Was "State of the Art"?

When I started in radio, every time a station upgraded some major piece of equipment, you'd start airing promos about how your station had the latest state of the art in (fill in the blank). So what qualified as a "state of the art" upgrade that got promoted on air?

I came to Mexico in 1978 and quickly moved from working the evening shift, 4 PM - Midnight, to a day time shift with responsibility, 8 AM to 5 PM, as Program Director. I subscribed to every free trade publication I could find. They had names like Broadcasting, Radio World, Behind the Mic, and there were many others. The publication's producers's sold advertising in the magazine or tabloid to national brands, people in the radio industry wrote the articles and the publications were provided free of charge to working professionals in radio.

The articles ran the gamut of a radio station, from the latest technology in audio consoles, to turntables, headphones, microphones, transmitters and processing. Processing was the last audio amplifier/controller in the air chain before the transmitter - and controlled things like peak volume on your audio, boosting the low end frequency response and adding to the high frequency end end, too. I had ideas on how to improve the quality of our radio signal - not spend a boat load of money - and have state of the art equipment. Jerry Johnson was great to work for in that respect, if I could present my case of how much better the station would be to get a new (fill in the blank), then he was very receptive to replacing some of the outdated equipment.

In the early days of radio, the industry came with standards and specifications. Some were designed to provide the best quality product to the listener, some were designed to meet FCC regulations for keeping your signal contained to where it should be on the radio dial.

Loudness and frequency response had FCC regulations - that meant to a station that meeting those guidelines you could sound very good - or not coming up to those guidelines - not sound as good as the competition.

Small, medium and major radio markets had loudness wars in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Whoever could get the latest processing technology would sound better and and have that signal "jump out at you" on the radio dial. Those with outdated processing sounded weak by comparison..

In all markets, what your station used for processing was usually kept secret - so the competition couldn't go out and buy the same processing equipment and suddenly sound just as good as you did.

In 1978, it was like no one at the station had really cared to keep up with "state of the art" in the entire broadcast chain. And it must have been like that in most small markets - any profits went into the pockets of the owners while the staff had to make do with the equipment they had until the equipment died.

In an earlier post I talked about replacing the audio consoles in the studios. That was a major upgrade for the station in 1983/84 and required ripping out all of the old audio wiring and replacing it with new audio wiring inside conduits made for the electricity. At that point, the station got "state of the art" audio consoles.

Electro Voice 666 Studio Mic - still in use as studio mics until the
early 80s at the station in Mexco

The microphones in use when I started had also been around a while. They were made by ElectroVoice and had been state of the art in the 50s. It was time to replace those, too.

The first replacements were Sennheiser 421s:

Sennheiser 421 - good but shallow on the bass end

The processing being used dated back to the 60s and had equipment with names like Volumax and Audimax, made by CBS. But by 1978, during broadcasts of things like a high school football game, you could hear the crowd noise moving back and forth from left to right and right to left because the air chain had not been kept up to specifications. You may say, "OK", as you read that statement about crowd noise moving back and forth. But if you listened to a broadcast in stereo, it could actually make you nauseous by the constant movement of the sound back and forth - that was called platform motion. As equipment aged, something for the right channel may have changed audio characteristics sooner than the same equipment for the left channel.

The equipment back then was basically designed for AM and a single audio channel, then adapted for FM, which brought left and right stereo to the listener. So depending on the equipment and the station, the right channel could sound quite a bit different from the left channel.

New equipment designed just for FM stereo, treated the left and right channel audio identically and created stations that seemed to blast out of the radio as you tuned past them.

I was not only there for some major upgrades to state of the art equipment, I was also the impetus behind those upgrades for KWWR and KXEO.

From new microphones, tape machines, turntables, audio processing and everything that affected how a station sounded on the air - I was keeping up with the latest trends and tried to get older equipment replaced.
Jerry was OK with that, because he saw it as a way the station could grow and make more money - if we were the best sounding radio station in the area.

So the early 80s were a time of change for KWWR and KXEO. And I was there at ground zero. I had no idea at the time what we were accomplishing in terms of the industry. I had the attitude of why wouldn't ANY station want the latest state of the art equipment to sound best on the radio dial? It wasn't until much later I discovered that wasn't always the case at other small market stations and it made the Mexico radio stations very unique in the 80s.

More to come - stay tuned.

So it goes.