Back in the late 70s or early 80s, WAXY in Ft Lauderdale sounded better than any station had a right to. Does anyone know what they had in their air chain?
bigdonho-
Because it has been so long and is history, I hope no one will mind if I opine and speculate.
WAXY engineers were pros, and they had RKO resources. The studios were amazing.
Someone may have told me that WAXY was using Optimod 8100, which according to Orban website timeline, was introduced in 1980. If PR&E Mulitmax was available at the time, it could have been in front of the 8100.
There could have been a plug in "aftermarket" card in the Optimod, or Texars in front, (if they were available at the time).
I doubt it, because WAXY/RKO culture seemed to be PR&E, and odds are the Multimax and 8100 would have done the trick, along with Tomcat Max-Trax.
An audio processing person might say WAXY was playing to the cheap seats. However they did it with
RKO money, excellent engineering and top notch equipment. Meanwhile across the street...
bigdonho, audio processing aside, what you were
probably hearing and noticing on WAXY were PR&E Tomcat cart machines operating in matrix mode. If this speculation by me is correct, this meant the station audio was rock solid in-phase in mono, which was significant considering the meat and potatoes of the format was oldies. The trade-off was mono compatibility vs stereo separation. WAXY stereo separation on carted material would have been compromised in order to prioritize mono compatibility.
Anyone could buy Tomcats, a station I worked for in another market had them.
Someone might have run them at 15 ips (which Tomcat could do). This put more audio on more tape real estate.
Doing this required making arrangements to auto-switch the playback decks to 7 1/2 ips for long songs that could not fit on a cart at 15 ips.
In addition, PR&E Tomcat had Max-Trax, which was their trade name for a tape track format that was not compatible with other cart machines. As I recall Max-Trax is two audio tracks and a much smaller track for the cue audio. Again, this was about putting more audio on more tape real estate.
If you want the "track width blues", imagine recording music on a 24 track 2 inch machine.
Finally- RKO may have had
better sourcing of music audio, compared to other stations. WAXY could have dubbed from a carefully curated music library, in terms of audio, and version/mix/pressing "authenticity" in the judgement of programmers. This makes a big difference.
In summary- I think you were hearing the result of excellent engineers, top quality equipment, and the full resources (financial, engineering and programming) of the owner.