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What's the worst sounding station you've heard?

I got the OK to post the clips. Here's a link directly the WSLV data page on my site where the mp3s are available for download.

Here's what's been uploaded:

  • A long commercial break for local businesses from around 4pm.
  • A segment of jock banter pushing the streaming option, plus weather from out-of-market Birmingham TV meteorologist J-P Dice.
  • A 22 minute clip featuring a short break, followed by the swap shop show. It's a hoot!
  • A quick imaging sample.
  • A long jingle that appears to be a mix of a 60's-era sun WSLV jingle edited to what may be an ABC Classic Country jingle.
  • And finally, the sign on where it sounds like they're flipping the transmitter on, right in the middle of a song.

I am particularly enamored with the swap shop clip. That is one thick accent. "Pig-eh-lee-Wig-eh-lee" cracks me up every time. ;D
 
Zach said:
I got the OK to post the clips. Here's a link directly the WSLV data page on my site where the mp3s are available for download.

Here's what's been uploaded:

  • A long commercial break for local businesses from around 4pm.
  • A segment of jock banter pushing the streaming option, plus weather from out-of-market Birmingham TV meteorologist J-P Dice.
  • A 22 minute clip featuring a short break, followed by the swap shop show. It's a hoot!
  • A quick imaging sample.
  • A long jingle that appears to be a mix of a 60's-era sun WSLV jingle edited to what may be an ABC Classic Country jingle.
  • And finally, the sign on where it sounds like they're flipping the transmitter on, right in the middle of a song.

I am particularly enamored with the swap shop clip. That is one thick accent. "Pig-eh-lee-Wig-eh-lee" cracks me up every time. ;D
Click to expand...

I miss being able to tune in this kind of radio.
As someone who has always lived near Chicago, I used to be able to hear stations like this, but they're gone now.
Whe I traveled I always tuned around to find stations that sound like this.
They are in and FROM an actual place, they don't sound like a disemebodied satellite voice that could be from anywhere.
I won't call it bad. Heck, that Chevy 350 and trans for $500 sounds like a good deal. :)
 
We all have our Mom and Pop horror stories. Live and locally owned was not so great after all.
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Actually there are several so called mom and pop stations that actually do well revenue wise. They might not be a Kiss Fm or Z100 but they serve their market well.

Polished..nah..fun to listen to yes.

wouldn't trade for the world all the great tacky but fun mom and pop stations I worked for.
 
WLSA-FM in Louisa, Virginia, now WOJL was a candidate for a poor-at-best sounding station.

CD's skipping for an hour or more, especially on Friday and Saturday nights, long gaps between the end of a song and the DJ either cueing up a new tune or talking (anywhere from 3-10 minutes many times) audio that sounded much like the DJ was sitting across the room from the mic, and general conversation in the studio over the open mic while music was playing were the norm.

They played some decent early country from time to time, but they really needed some polishing, and a source of music. I remember hearing them playing a CD in its entirety of country hits of the late 60's. I had the exact CD and knew it well, so hearing it played song for song over the air was 'kinda funny.

I also recall one DJ on Saturday nights who sounded like he'd been drinking or otherwise impaired every time he'd pop on and try to make an announcement.

It was very entertaining though.
 
Sounds like WSLV is running a "Legends of Country" satellite feed from somebody... just without the computer or carts to fire any IDs or commercials. :D (9:30 central time Monday morning)

I wonder what time people show up at the station? Obviously that's when the fun REALLY starts.

It didn't take me long to find the website, but if you want to listen and giggle along, it's http://www.wslvradio.com/. Their latest Twitter update, posted on the page, from 19 days ago, was:

"what's happening"

8) This promises to be more fun than I've had listening to radio in YEARS... maybe decades!! Thanks so much for pointing them out!

UPDATE: ...ah, during the silence between the stopset and the song, where I an ID should have gone, I could hear a nice 60-cycle hum... ;D (I hear some distortion, but I don't know if that's on the air or if they're just overloading the input of their streamer; I can cut them some slack for that, so many of the "big boys" still can't set a computer input level...)
 
And how many of you worked for "Mom and Pop" stations that were "AOR: All over the road", formatically?

I worked at a station that was A/C in the morning (with a morning guy who always opened his breaks with "Good Mornin', Darlin'"!)

Middays, they were a more bright A/C until 1 pm, when the station went to beautiful music for 3 hours.

At 4 pm, they were country...at 7 pm, they were rock and roll for the kids at the local college.

Oh yeah, at 9 am, they simulcast with the local cable tv company, an hour long women's talk show called "Ladies Line"!

Was I surprised when it went bankrupt and was sold to another owner? Not, really...
 
Generally, the worst-sounding stations I've heard are Spanish language stations. They have all the symptoms of bad stations: loud hums and buzzes, mics left open for several songs at a time, sometimes cassette/CD players are held up to the microphone.

Years ago, I encountered an AOR station that put its night/weekend music and talk breaks on reels. They played the same reels in the same order every night for several weeks. If the reels ran out or broke down: dead air.

I love the swap-and-shop shows. We have a couple on country/farm rimshots around here. "Hello? Yeah, I got here a 1981 Dodge pickup, floorboard rusted through, uh, a gun rack, and a yellow lamp. Lookin' for $150 for the set, or a motor for my boat." Unfortunately, craigslist has made the radio swap show obsolete.
 
TheRob said:
Generally, the worst-sounding stations I've heard are Spanish language stations. They have all the symptoms of bad stations: loud hums and buzzes, mics left open for several songs at a time, sometimes cassette/CD players are held up to the microphone.
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Strange. You must be in a very small Hispanic market. The Spanish language formats I am familiar with sound very good. This is probably due to the fact that the Hispanic-targeted segment of the radio market is doing better in general than the overall market and still has professional, and sometimes brilliant, technical staffs.

And I've never, even in smaller markets, heard the sort of stuff you describe.

And you, obviously, have never heard stations like KLVE, WSKQ, WRUM, WKAQ, WPRM, etc., either.
 
DavidEduardo said:
TheRob said:
Generally, the worst-sounding stations I've heard are Spanish language stations. They have all the symptoms of bad stations: loud hums and buzzes, mics left open for several songs at a time, sometimes cassette/CD players are held up to the microphone.
Click to expand...

Strange. You must be in a very small Hispanic market. The Spanish language formats I am familiar with sound very good. This is probably due to the fact that the Hispanic-targeted segment of the radio market is doing better in general than the overall market and still has professional, and sometimes brilliant, technical staffs.

And I've never, even in smaller markets, heard the sort of stuff you describe.

And you, obviously, have never heard stations like KLVE, WSKQ, WRUM, WKAQ, WPRM, etc., either.
Click to expand...

I can assure the small flea power AM on the outskirts of town that's doing Spanish language programming is nothing like KLVE or WPRM. I know what TheRob is talking about and I've heard it around Birmingham and north Alabama where the only Spanish stuff is on rimshot low power AMs.

It tends to be less open mic gaffes and more skipping CDs and general overmodulation, problems that aren't all that uncommon on ANY small AM these days, sadly.

On the other hand, the ones I've heard (and I don't speak Spanish) sound live and local a lot of the time which is more than I can say for Typical Corporate Radio.
 
Yes, 1kw AM only, and one of them was a daytimer.

Even though something like 9% of the population speaks Spanish here, it hasn't caught up with radio. The budgets are tiny and it shows on the air. They are definitely the worst-sounding stations around here.
 
DavidEduardo said:
And I've never, even in smaller markets, heard the sort of stuff you describe.
Click to expand...

In my neighborhood, the two Spanish language stations sound very profesional. That's market 148 or so.
 
TheRob said:
Yes, 1kw AM only, and one of them was a daytimer.

Even though something like 9% of the population speaks Spanish here, it hasn't caught up with radio. The budgets are tiny and it shows on the air. They are definitely the worst-sounding stations around here.
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Then you should not generalize as in "Generally, the worst-sounding stations I've heard are Spanish language stations."

As another post specifies, small rimshot Spanish language AMs are often going to sound about like small rimshot English AMs... stations with barely the revenue to stay afloat, used and ill-kept equipment and transmitters that not even a station in Burkina Faso would touch.
 
Typically, from what I have noticed, the worst ones are the brokered ones.
in DFW the worst of the worst are the Asian stations, over modulated to the point of unintelligible distortion. Whether it be AM or FM.
The Spanish AMs here can be bad as well, same problem.

But all these are brokered.
 
If I can dismiss airstaff performance for a moment, can I ask if we can say any station still using highly compressed digital audio should qualify as "the worst sounding station" yet? There's no excuse in this day and age of high quality FLAC and AAC music compression algorithms that anyone should be using mp2/Musicam or some other low bit rate, swishy and twinkly getup.

*glares at Clear Channel Mobile*

Yes I know it's "just FM" and it's "played on cheap radios" but I can tell a difference and that's what matters. It's doubly annoying when their low bitrate audio is sent through a compressed STL link, and then sent out through an HD encoder. Cascading codecs always sound bad and should be a no-no in modern radio ops!

Lest this turn into a corporate bashing session, I'll admit that both Cox and Cumulus take great pains to make their stations sound as good and clean as possible. As much as I despise Cumulus as a company, their stations here are spectacularly clean and live sounding, with rich audio. If those cheap bastiges can do it, everyone can.

And I'm not letting the little guy off the hook, either. We have a little Class A here, locally owned and targeting the beach communities called "Sunny 105.7" and their music is over compressed as well. In fact, it's not just low bit rate swirly swishy audio, it's also the most poorly processed FM station I've heard south of I-20. In the entire US. Crank that midrange to 11, boys!

It's a shame, because they have a fantastic local presence and a wide playlist the big boys can't touch. But if the sound quality is going to be sub-AM quality, I ain't listenin'.
 
Does inconsistence count? In Fort Myers Florida there is a 5kw AM station playing music that changes it's sound from hour to hour. Sometimes it's very bassy othertimes very tinny.Other times the audio skips or is over modulated. The one consistent thing is there is a very clear hum during quiet periods. It's really a trip to tune in each day to see what it will sound like next
 
I've got two

WSHR - 91.9 Lake Ronkonkoma NY (1990's... station sounds great today)... 6kw FM High School station that sounds great today, back in the 90's it was a jazz format with which the students had no interaction. All shows were pre-recorded on VHS tape and played back on machines with tracking issues. There was no main "console", just a switching system with timers to start the different machines at different times. Oh, and all the VCR's were mix and match mono and stereo units and the tapes I'm told came from "anyone who would record them". The tapes were supposed to be recorded in EP mode, but some were done incorrectly in the SP mode and you'd have 4 hours of dead air because the VHS tape ran out in 2 hours and the next machine didn't start for 4 more. The ID was on a cart that was timed to fire once an hour (sometimes). Processing was an old Gates FM Limiter.

WNOS - 1450 New Bern, NC. The station is a FOX Sports affiliate. They're using a Behringer mixer and sending audio over a T-1 (about the only thing they are doing right) to an FM translator that's being processed with an Inovonics AM processor. They're picking up the FM off air at the AM transmitter site and rebroadcasting it. The tuner at the AM site is an analog unit that drifts and doesn't tolerate being in the high RF environment, so every time there is dead air (quite often) or a pause, all this distortion is sucked up by the AM processor. Even better is when the translator fails (it's in a site with no backup power), the front end of the receiver then gets swamped by the local 100kw rock FM and the AM retransmits that.
 
Zach said:
If I can dismiss airstaff performance for a moment, can I ask if we can say any station still using highly compressed digital audio should qualify as "the worst sounding station" yet? There's no excuse in this day and age of high quality FLAC and AAC music compression algorithms that anyone should be using mp2/Musicam or some other low bit rate, swishy and twinkly getup.

*glares at Clear Channel Mobile*

Yes I know it's "just FM" and it's "played on cheap radios" but I can tell a difference and that's what matters. It's doubly annoying when their low bitrate audio is sent through a compressed STL link, and then sent out through an HD encoder. Cascading codecs always sound bad and should be a no-no in modern radio ops!

Lest this turn into a corporate bashing session, I'll admit that both Cox and Cumulus take great pains to make their stations sound as good and clean as possible. As much as I despise Cumulus as a company, their stations here are spectacularly clean and live sounding, with rich audio. If those cheap bastiges can do it, everyone can.

And I'm not letting the little guy off the hook, either. We have a little Class A here, locally owned and targeting the beach communities called "Sunny 105.7" and their music is over compressed as well. In fact, it's not just low bit rate swirly swishy audio, it's also the most poorly processed FM station I've heard south of I-20. In the entire US. Crank that midrange to 11, boys!

It's a shame, because they have a fantastic local presence and a wide playlist the big boys can't touch. But if the sound quality is going to be sub-AM quality, I ain't listenin'.
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I'm familiar with the station you are talking about Zach and I agree "The Voice of Paradise" has abysmal audio quality to say the least. I, however, gotta respectfully disagree with the statement that Cumulus stations and the "clean and live sounding" audio. When I lived on the Gulf Coast WYOK (Then Hot 104) and WBLX were severely over processed. Q100 sounded O.K. All other markets I've heard where Cumulus is present sound pretty bland audio wise. To my ears CBS and Clear Channel generally have the crispest and clearest sounding stations out of the big companies.


To input a "best of the worst" station.. 1380 WGYV in Greenville, AL. I heard them a few times and they would always be dead for 5 minutes at the top of the hour instead of airing news. Often they would air silence during local commercial avails.. And perhaps the best about them was a "religious" program that featured a very southern minister/psychic who was "healing" the callers and was oddly specific about mundane things they would be doing in the future. THAT was entertainment.
 
Gasping4Airtime said:
I'm familiar with the station you are talking about Zach and I agree "The Voice of Paradise" has abysmal audio quality to say the least. I, however, gotta respectfully disagree with the statement that Cumulus stations and the "clean and live sounding" audio. When I lived on the Gulf Coast WYOK (Then Hot 104) and WBLX were severely over processed. Q100 sounded O.K. All other markets I've heard where Cumulus is present sound pretty bland audio wise. To my ears CBS and Clear Channel generally have the crispest and clearest sounding stations out of the big companies.


To input a "best of the worst" station.. 1380 WGYV in Greenville, AL. I heard them a few times and they would always be dead for 5 minutes at the top of the hour instead of airing news. Often they would air silence during local commercial avails.. And perhaps the best about them was a "religious" program that featured a very southern minister/psychic who was "healing" the callers and was oddly specific about mundane things they would be doing in the future. THAT was entertainment.
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I think Cumulus tweaked the processing of WYOK when they went to the Jack FM format. I can't stick around BLX long enough to get a feel for it on the analog, but I have listened for a few on HD and it sounded really good since they didn't use subchannels. Maybe the processing there is different. The processing with Journey 100 is definitely a step up from the past. If someone didn't twiddle a knob during the stunting, I'd be surprised.

Otherwise, I do agree about Clear Channel and CBS in other markets, they do alright for big companies. Mobile just happens to stand out for poor audio encoding. They really sound bad compared to other markets. I guess mp3/FLAC haven't made it here yet.

Most of the bad sounding stations IMHO are small town or locally owned, lacking either money to invest in good processing or lacking engineers with good ears or GMs who don't know what they're doing.

FWIW last time I heard 1380 in Greenville it was pretty much as you described. Dead air and some odd preaching. I've got them listed as oldies on my website, so they may be playing music now. They have a CP to move to Indiana (!)
 
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