KVIL Audio Qualtiy

Has anyone else noticed the abysmal audio quality on KVIL this weekend ?? It almost sounds like the 75u pre emphasis is turned off (Like someone accidentally turned down the treble all the way). To me it is unlistenable.
In this day and age I am surprised to see things like this happen.

it's possible they maybe trying to make adjustments to the audio sound to KVIL as ALT 103.7 to match the other Alternative Rock stations under ownership of Entercom. has any other now Entercom stations in this market changed their audio quality too.

No. Everyone else sounds the same as they have. As for matching other markets, I suppose it is possible, however, I have heard other Entercom stations in the past and none have sounded THIS bad.

I noticed that myself, whenever the song picks up and gets loud the audio loses a bit of its quality. My guess is they're running it too hard but whatever the problem is I wouldn't expect it to stick around too long.

So on HD, it sounds fine, so I think it is something on the non-hd side, most likely the pre emphasis is off.

A quick call to their engineering department got this fixed very quickly. A job well done by the Entercom Dallas folks.

Wish it was that easy to get these stations to set their RDS clocks!
Only one, 102.1, sets their clock properly on time and on the DST transition day. The worst one is 91.7 KKXT. Last time I tried it they were about an hour and a half off.

I seriously doubt the pre-emp was off at anytime, there would be no reason for that.
As for RDS Time, its not a very supported feature so I can't fault any station for not keeping up with it.

LibertyNT said:

As for RDS Time, its not a very supported feature so I can't fault any station for not keeping up with it.

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They should just turn it off then. RDS is how my car radio sets its time.

A quick call to their engineering department got this fixed very quickly. A job well done by the Entercom Dallas folks.

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No one in the building apparently monitors the station over-the-air???

Liberty, it sounded like they might defaulted their audio processor or more than likely, restored a setup from another market that didn’t use pre emphasis on the box.

gettinbyagain said:

Liberty, it sounded like they might defaulted their audio processor or more than likely, restored a setup from another market that didn’t use pre emphasis on the box.

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Why would any station not use pre-emph? I've heard what that sounds like and it's horrible.

Robert Bass said:

Why would any station not use pre-emph? I've heard what that sounds like and it's horrible.

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Easy to simulate. Just turn the treble on your receiver all the way down and maybe switch in a high filter to get a 13+ dB treble cut at 10 kHz, equivalent to no 75 uS emphasis.

Megapsycle said:

Easy to simulate. Just turn the treble on your receiver all the way down and maybe switch in a high filter to get a 13+ dB treble cut at 10 kHz, equivalent to no 75 uS emphasis.

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Umm, OK.... Still doesn't answer my question though.

From my experience processors seem like they default with Pre-emphasis on.
Based on what I heard KVIL always had it on but had the processing set too aggressively if anything.

Robert Bass said:

Why would any station not use pre-emph? I've heard what that sounds like and it's horrible.

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Robert Bass said:

Umm, OK.... Still doesn't answer my question though.

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I figured that was one of those rhetorical questions. I would speculate it was done unknowingly, due to incompetence, and not bothering to actually listen to the on-air audio... who knows other than the people in charge.

And from Liberty's comment that's how I always heard KVIL.. processed and bright if anything, didn't catch it with the pre-emphasis off while I was searching for an FM station with an accurate RDS clock setting. (My radios usually stay on stations below 92 mHz.) Maybe it was defaulted to the Euro 50 uS emphasis, half the treble loss, only slightly muddy, and no one noticed.

For giggles I've switched the preemphasis between 75us 50us and none at all on our FM exciter on more than one occasion. The difference is immediately apparent between 75 and 50 and especially noticeable with pre-emp completely off. 50us is better than nothing but only a step-up from AM quality, no pre-emp is very close to the sound of AM. (at least to my ears)

I really seriously doubt that the pre-emphasis was turned off at any time since Alt Flipped. Its more likely that a staff member switched presets or manually adjusted the settings to something more aggressive for the Rock format and overdid it. In my ears it sounded as if the processor was being over-driven, I can get similar results by running our Audimax and Optimod too hot.