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Aircheck: Muzak "Foreground Music One"--13 February 2002

S

spiritof67

Leading Participant
In St. Louis, the Muzak "Foreground Music One" Adult Contemporary service was carried on the 92 kHz SCA of KEZK (102.5 MHz). I believe the FM subcarrier service was dropped in 2005. Back in 2002, I recorded some audio from this service. The "FM-1" service has been something I have enjoyed over the years, and thought I would share what I have. Being a FM subcarrier, the audio quality is slightly limited (when compared to FM), but is worth a listen.

Here is 2 1/3 hours of FM-1. This file is 192/44.1 and can be found at this link:

http://www.4shared.com/mp3/CO6jQaZ5ba/Muzak_Foreground_Music_One-13_.html
 
Thanks Paul for this aircheck from FM1. Lots of great old AC music - even some smooth AC from Al Jarreau and Sade. If not for the early 00s songs, this would probably sound like a Soft Rock station in the early 1990s. I don't really know of any businesses that still use FM1...there are several different chains that use specialized playlists (McDonalds is one) but as for FM-1, since there's no IDs at all on the broadcasts, I wouldn't really know.

-crainbebo
 
On "the other site", someone says CVS uses FM1. Food Lion may have, but based on the songs I've been hearing, they now have Hot FM if they're even using a Muzak channel. Food Lion and CVS did play the same songs at one point.
 
I have it on Now since I would have listened to it at work in 2002, and that was before I had a computer and could go to the playlist to find the songs. Do you have a song list
Also when I tried to share it on the MUZAK FANS Facebook page it was blocked by them as Unsafe which has me a little worried
I tried again and it let it on the Bitdefender thing gives it a green light I remember many of these songs playing from that time
 
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crainbebo said:
Thanks Paul for this aircheck from FM1. Lots of great old AC music - even some smooth AC from Al Jarreau and Sade. If not for the early 00s songs, this would probably sound like a Soft Rock station in the early 1990s. I don't really know of any businesses that still use FM1...there are several different chains that use specialized playlists (McDonalds is one) but as for FM-1, since there's no IDs at all on the broadcasts, I wouldn't really know.

-crainbebo
Click to expand...
I know Publix Super Markets has FM1 from looking at the FM1 Playlist. I remember the Al Jarreau song playing around that time. I should be able to google the lyrics on the songs that I have no clue what it is and add a few more songs to my list of Songs heard at Publix
 
spiritof67 said:
In St. Louis, the Muzak "Foreground Music One" Adult Contemporary service was carried on the 92 kHz SCA of KEZK (102.5 MHz). I believe the FM subcarrier service was dropped in 2005. Back in 2002, I recorded some audio from this service. The "FM-1" service has been something I have enjoyed over the years, and thought I would share what I have. Being a FM subcarrier, the audio quality is slightly limited (when compared to FM), but is worth a listen.

Here is 2 1/3 hours of FM-1. This file is 192/44.1 and can be found at this link:

http://www.4shared.com/mp3/CO6jQaZ5ba/Muzak_Foreground_Music_One-13_.html
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. It took me back to a different time at work. I was able to either remember the songs or was able to Google the lyrics to find out who it was, got them all except for the instrumental song.
 
That was "Mornin'" by Al Jarreau, from 1983. Huge AC hit in the 80s, played on smooth jazz and soft AC stations well into the 00s.
The instrumental song you heard was pianist Jim Brickman's "Rendezvous."
I really enjoy the Peter Cetera song "Just Like Love" that's on this aircheck. A song that probably hasn't been heard on ANY AC station since this recording was made.

-crainbebo
 
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crainbebo said:
That was "Mornin'" by Al Jarreau, from 1983. Huge AC hit in the 80s, played on smooth jazz and soft AC stations well into the 00s.
The instrumental song you heard was pianist Jim Brickman's "Rendezvous."
I really enjoy the Peter Cetera song "Just Like Love" that's on this aircheck. A song that probably hasn't been heard on ANY AC station since this recording was made.

-crainbebo
Click to expand...

No the Al Jarreau was not an instrumental. it was the instrumental song between the Edwin McCann 'I could not ask for more" song and the Doobie Brothers "Just in Time"
OOPS should have read the whole post thanks for the information I was thinking it was Jim Brickman. Now we have them all
 
I guarantee I won't be trying this at home.
Click to expand...

So do it overnight, then. Set it to download, go to bed, then in the morning the file should be there on your disk.

Well, that was how we used to do it when the best anybody had were V42 or V90 modems.
 
spiritof67--

How was this recorded, minidisk/HIFI VHS tape? Doesn't seem like cassette because of the low background noise and that it's continuous.

Seems to me that the computers of the time (experience) would have still been too limited to reliably handle such a long recording, especially in PCM. Unless you had access to, say, a decent Pentium III/IV with lots of RAM and a big enough disk (very expensive then).
 
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Ah, were you going into a deck or a portable? (minidisk and SCA tuner make/model?) I have both but all I've ever tried recording SCA into was a portable and keep getting intermittant but regular static bursts as the machine writes to the disk. It seems the interference tends to radiate down the cable into the tuner. I use an older Okano "Information Radio Receiver" (http://ebay.com/itm/261271369674) and either a Sony MZS1 or MZN510 minidisk portable (mono mode) with a big long Rat Shack male-male TRS cable to connect it.

If you were using a portable, how did you suppress the noise, choking the cable?

I also used to have a Sony ICF36 receiver with an Elving Elf-2A SCA demodulator. That rig was an excellent VHF SAP monitor but performed very poorly on SCA (too wide).
 
It was a MD deck--a Sony MDS-JB920 that was used in this case. Like you, I have run into interference issues when recording on a portable unit. Using a cable directly from a radio to a portable unit adds noise. One thing that you might do is use the tape input/output jacks on a receiver/amp to make your recordings.

I used Elving's modified ICF36 to make this recording. I agree with you on its overall performance as well. That said, the AM section has a wide bandwidth that sounds great for music stations.
 
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Does yours have the Elf or the other demodulator that was supposed to be more sensitive to SCA? Does your rig also do that weird thing where you have to set the tone (bandwidth?) switch to "HIGH" (wide?) to correctly receive SCA?

On mine I did otherwise SCA would be extremely distorted if tunable at all. Setting it to "LOW" (narrow?) did seem to make SAP more comfortable to listen to with earphones, though it made it very difficult to tune accurately.

Oh yeah, the Elf can also be used as a visual CQAM "presence detector" if you have an LED attached to it. It can not (to my knowledge) be used to actually receive AM stereo, but it can be used to detect if there's a stereo carrier present. If you set the coarse tuning to a known MW station transmitting stereo then set the SCA fine tuning to somewhere on the low (?) end, you can get the LED to light up. Once you set it there, you can then jog up and down the dial and make a log of all the stations you can receive that are transmitting in stereo.
 
Darth, I'm not exactly sure about the specifics of my particular demodulator. I have two Elving modified radios with the same tuneable attachment (the other radio being an Optimus 12-603a, a tuned RF radio similar to a GE Super Radio). Both have a knob that allows the user to tune the SCA bandwidth from 92, 67, and 48 (?) kHz ranges. Neither of my radios require my switching a bandwidth or a tone control to get an SCA signal. I do set my tone controls low to reduce interference from the main signal, however (as in this Muzak aircheck). I believe the low end of the spectrum detects RDS. In St. Louis, there are a few voice SCA's--two blind/radio reading services, and a Vietnamese community service. Besides that, some stations use it as a talk back service for live remotes.

I wasn't aware of the C-Quam presence detector--I should try that on WLS when I get the chance.
 
Here's what I was going to post earlier but couldn't find the link to it:
The Elf-2A adapter includes a trimpot or control, for tuning SCS and SAP from 67 through 102.271 kHz. It plays on 3.5 to 14 v DC, and is recommended for portable radios. It features an L-E-D (light emitting diode) which glows brightly only when an SCS or SAP program is correctly tuned in—a neat feature! *snip* It's the most versatile of all adapters.

The SCS Radio Technologies' adapter shown right is physically larger, about 5 cm square, and is for either 67 or 92 kHz. It includes mute or squelch for use with background music stations that shut their SCS carriers off between songs, *snip*, is a two frequency adapter, with 67 and 92 kHz outputs! It includes two toggle switches mounted right on the circuit board. One switch goes from main to SCS and the other from 67 to 92 kHz.
Click to expand...
http://web.archive.org/web/20060703092124/http://members.aol.com/fmatlas/home.html

(He seemed to prefer the term "SCS" over the more common "SCA", for some reason. Don't remember why, or what that extra "S" was supposed to mean.)

The Elf was his "house brand" demodulator and the SCA-RT may have been a third-party unit. The former can be identified by the model name on the printed circuit board, I.I.R.C. on the underside. It can definitely tune RDS and with enough coaxing (and filtering) the stereo-difference channel (sort of). On NTSC broadcasts it could also get the "pro" channel up around 102 kHz, KGW used it for some sort of FSK data transmission but I don't remember ever getting anything intelligible from it. (telemetry?)
 
Revisiting this thread a moment; it may have been that my ICF36 was of a later hardware revision than yours, with a redesigned audio section. That might explain why on mine the tone had to be set to "HIGH" to get any SCA audio (or satisfactory SAP audio), and why the "tone" switch acted more like a bandwidth filter.

For future reference and sake of completion, I took the liberty of archiving the aircheck (and this thread) for the rest of eternity on Muzak Foreground Music One (FM-1) SCA aircheck KEZK 102.5 + 92 kHz - 102.5920 MHz - 13 February 2002 : Muzak Holdings LLC : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive .
 
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