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May 19, 2003
Back to the Doo-Wop at CBS-FM
By SCOTT FYBUSH
*NEW YORK's oldies station is slowly
returning some pre-1964 music to its playlist, after gradual
changes over the past few years that removed pretty much everything
from WCBS-FM (101.1 New York) that predated the Beatles.
 No, the "O"
word hasn't returned to the Infinity station's imaging - and,
yeah, there's still some '80s Billy Joel in the playlist - but
the station made a concession to its older listeners over the
weekend when it returned doo-wop music to its Sunday night schedule.
You'll recall the outcry last August when CBS-FM eliminated
the "Doo-Wop Shop" on Sundays; as of last night, it's
back, in a modified form - under the title "The Heart of
Rock'n' Roll," and hosted by former WCBS-FM personality
Norm N. Nite, who's back in Cleveland and doing the show from
the Alan Freed Studio at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Don
K. Reed loses that Sunday night airshift, but remains on weekday
overnights.
Speaking of weekday overnights and New York City, we now know
a little more about the deal between AFTRA and four of Clear
Channel's New York FMs (WKTU, WAXQ, WWPR and WLTW) that averted
a potential strike there: the company will be allowed
to voicetrack the stations between midnight and 6AM, but anyone
doing tracks for the stations from out of the market will have
to be paid at least $20,000 a year and receive the same benefits
as New York AFTRAns. What's more, the deal now requires anyone
appearing on-air as a sidekick, weather or traffic personality
to be covered under the AFTRA contract.
And what's up with WQHT (Hot 97.1) morning jock "Star"?
We hear he walked off the show again at the end of
the week...apparently upset about being docked pay for his suspension
earlier in the month.
Heading upstate, Galaxy is shuffling its translators in Syracuse.
"K-Rock" WKRL (100.9 North Syracuse) is no longer being
heard on W267AL (101.3 Syracuse); instead W267AL is simulcasting
classic country WSCP-FM (101.7 Sandy Creek), which it can do
now that Galaxy no longer owns the translator (it's now licensed
to "M&D Translator.") K-Rock is still being heard
on W249BC (97.7 Mattydale), displacing WZUN (102.1 Phoenix) from
that translator; meantime, Clear Channel has flipped its W252AC
(98.3 Syracuse/Camillus) from urban WPHR (106.9 Auburn) to K-Rock
competitor WWDG (105.1 DeRuyter).
We don't normally spend much time on radio stations' summer
concerts, but we've got to mention the "98PXY Summer Jam"
that hometown WPXY (97.9 Rochester) had planned for May 27 at
Frontier Field. The Summer Jam was supposed to feature Michelle
Branch, L.L. Cool J and Lisa Marie Presley...but it was called
off last week because of poor ticket sales.
 In Buffalo, we'd
neglected to mention that WGRZ (Channel 2) dropped its 10 PM
newscast on LMA partner WPXJ (Channel 51) a few weeks back, while
we were out of town. We'll miss the nice signal on the Buffalo
news (WPXJ, licensed to Batavia, comes in quite well in Rochester!)
- but we'll be able to tune in to another sorta-Buffalo newscast
in a few months, when Sinclair expects to launch its Maryland-based
"News Central" on WB affiliate WNYO-TV (Channel 49);
Sinclair's bigger Fox affiliate, WUTV (Channel 29), will continue
to carry syndicated shows at 10. The WPXJ newscast had been getting
roundly beaten in the ratings by WIVB's 10 PM news on sister
station WNLO (Channel 23).
Get ready for some more familiar voices on WWKB (1520), just
in time for Tuesday's Buffalo Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame
dinner: 'KB imaging voice Don Berns will do a 12-2 PM shift on
WWKB on Tuesday, and then at 3, Danny Neaverth will be sitting
in for Sandy Beach on WBEN (930). (And NERW's still wondering
what the Pioneers did with that membership check of ours; it
cleared, yet we've gotten no mailings from them...despite all
the nice publicity we give that worthy group!)
*Four new stations were granted last week
in CANADA, all in the Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario market.
On 91.5, Global will get its first Ontario radio station, a 3600
watt urban CHR outlet to be known as "91.5 the Beat."
Global beat out other 91.5 applications from Rogers, CKMW (Toronto's
CIDC/CIAO) and Telephone City Broadcasting in Brantford, as well
as interventions from listeners to Toronto's CJRT (91.1) who
were concerned about interference.
On 99.5, Larche Communications (which owns CICZ up in Midland)
won a 1600 watt country station over competing proposals from
Doug Kirk, Rae Roe and Edward Bauman. Larche will have to pay
for 50-watt religious outlet CFWC in Brantford, currently on
99.5, to move to a different frequency.
 Sound of Faith was
granted 50 watts on 94.3 for a religious station, and Aboriginal
Voices Radio will get a 460-watt outlet on 102.5. (NERW notes:
those 99.5 and 102.5 outlets are likely to experience the same
interference from co-channel stations in Buffalo that eventually
forced the 92.9 in Cambridge to seek a different frequency...)
Over in London, Peter Garland is hanging up the headphones
after 22 years in morning drive at CFPL (980); his replacement,
beginning June 2, will be Joe Duchesne, who was on crosstown
CJBK (1290) in the seventies and later owned stations in Huntsville
and Parry Sound before retiring in 1996.
*In MASSACHUSETTS, Ted Sarandis has
been suspended for two weeks from his nighttime sports show on
WEEI (850 Boston), after callers to the show late on Monday night
found that "Ted Nation" had left the building. While
the phones lit up with people wanting to discuss the Celtics
game, Sarandis had signed off 20 minutes early and was playing
a taped interview...
 David Ives, the president of Boston's
WGBH Educational Foundation from 1970 until 1984, died Friday
(May 16) in San Francisco. Ives joined WGBH in 1960 and rose
to head the organization a decade later, seeing it through massive
changes that included the addition of WGBY (Channel 57) in Springfield
and the growth of WGBH as a national production center for PBS
with shows that included Julia Child, Nova, Masterpiece Theater
and Frontline.
Ives served as chair of the WGBH board of trustees from 1984
until his retirement in 2001.
Ives was 84; a memorial service for him will be held Thursday,
May 29, at Harvard's Memorial Church.
Emerson College's WERS (88.9 Boston) has applied to increase
power slightly from its One Financial Center transmitter; it
would jump from 4000 to 5800 watts if the application is granted.
As Salem gets ready to add a third Boston AM signal, WAMG
(1150), to its portfolio, the company has a new VP/operations
for its Boston and New York clusters: David Armstrong heads east
from Los Angeles, where he was VP/operations and GM for KRLA/KRLH/KKLA.
And Lindsy Parker's "PM Magazine" financial talk
show moves to a new timeslot on WBNW (1120 Concord) and WPLM
(1390 Plymouth): it will be heard Wednesdays and Thursdays at
5PM.
*In CONNECTICUT, Jimmy Buff, formerly
of WDST (100.1 Woodstock NY), joins WKZE-FM (98.1 Salisbury)
for middays and the PD chair; he replaces Hal Leffers, who leaves
the station.
*In NEW HAMPSHIRE, Jennifer "Jenny
from the Block" Brownlow moves north from WHOB (106.3 Nashua)
to join Nazzy and the morning team at WJYY (105.5 Concord).
 *In NEW JERSEY,
the last piece of the former Y107/Rumba "quadcast"
returned to the air last week, as Press launched "107.1
the Breeze" on WWZY (107.1 Long Branch).
The station shares its Jones soft AC format and "Captain
Jack" Aponte morning show with sister WBHX (99.7 Tuckerton)
down the coast; we hear it's looking to return to the Long Branch
transmitter site it used to use before Big City moved north to
the current site at Atlantic Highlands, which improved New York
City coverage at the expense of the Jersey Shore.
Meanwhile down the dial, Nassau replaced the WPST simulcast
on WEMG-FM (104.9 Egg Harbor City) with country late last week;
still no commercials, and word is that this, too, may turn out
to be a stunt.
*And with that, we can move along to a recap of one of the
more interesting moments of our trip down to New York City a
few weeks ago: our opportunity to take a ride in Ibiquity's IBOC
test van.
 Tom Ray of WOR arranged
the ride, and we met Tom and Ibiquity's Ken Brockel at WOR's
Times Square studios, where we had a brief chance to listen to
the latest version of the AM IBOC codec on the test receiver
that lives in the WOR control room, before heading out to the
street to hear the system in motion. In previous visits to WOR,
we'd noted that the control room is far from an ideal listening
environment, especially with the little Fostex speakers being
used - but with those limitations noted, the system sounded pretty
good there.
23 floors below, the Ford van full of test equipment awaited
us, and following a quick tour from Ken, we set out over the
potholes of Manhattan to hear how things sounded.
The van is outfitted with two digital radios: the handbuilt
Ibiquity test receiver (seen second from top in the right-hand
rack) and, just below it (strapped in to the rack), a prototype
Visteon consumer IBOC car radio.
There's also a standard-issue Visteon analog radio for comparison,
a Tascam digital audio recorder (shown at bottom left), as well
as a spectrum analyzer and a PC running custom-designed software
that monitors the signal strength and plots the van's location
using GPS, saving all the data for later analysis.
 We headed south on
Broadway with WOR's digital signal tuned in, though a null spot
right at the corner of 39th and Broadway immediately forced the
receiver into blend mode, which didn't work perfectly (we're
told the codec is going through one more revision, and the delay
for digital decoding currently varies between the test receiver
and the Visteon, thus making for a choppy blend on the test radio.)
Once we were on Broadway, though, the WOR signal remained
strong all the way down to lower Manhattan and Bleeker Street;
no surprise, really, as we remained right in the lobe of the
big directional signal from just across the Hudson.
Before turning north on the Bowery and Third Avenue, we switched
over to FM to hear WNEW (102.7), which turned its IBOC signal
back on just before launching "Blink" a few weeks ago;
all the way back up to 42nd Street and over past Bryant Park
(usually a multipath nightmare spot) and back to Times Square,
that signal remained locked in digital, an impressive achievement
in midtown Manhattan.
So how did it sound? The FM signal sounded great, with an
audible difference between the analog processing and the cleaner
digital sound. If there were any artifacts in the digital signal,
they weren't audible in the van (we're still waiting to hear
the system in action through headphones.)
As for the AM, let's just say we weren't surprised last week
to read that the NRSC still has concerns about the audio performance
of Ibiquity's codec. When we first heard the system at WOR last
year, it was using AAC coding; this time, it's switched to PAC
coding, and the results were far from perfect. While Ibiquity
notes that this wasn't the final version of the codec (and may
have been running an algorithm better designed for music than
speech), our ears picked up noticeable artifacting, especially
on male voices. At times, the system displayed the same "gurgling"
sounds familiar to users of low bit-rate audio streaming on the
Web - no surprise, really, given that the system operates at
only about 32 kb/second. While the digital audio sounded much
brighter than the analog audio (especially during musical bumps
and commercials), the analog (even though limited to 6 kHz) sounded
smoother.
And of course we know that this test didn't expose the system
to some of the real-world challenges it will face: WOR's AM signal
is about the best possible test bed for the system, putting massive
amounts of RF over Manhattan with nothing of any significance
on any adjacent channels. How would the van have fared up in
Rockland County, where we stay during these trips, deep in a
WOR null? And how will the system do in the more crowded RF realms
where most of the nation's AM stations dwell? This test can't
tell us. Ditto for FM: we never strayed beyond a few miles from
WNEW's transmitter on the Empire State Building; it would have
been fascinating to listen to the signal heading southwest towards
Philadelphia and first-adjacent WMGK (102.9). Perhaps someday...
We'll keep listening to the system just as often as we can
get down there to hear it (and as long as Tom and the Ibiquity
folks keep the doors open for us!); special thanks to Ken for
taking the time to drive your editor around, and to Tom for setting
it up.
 *Have you
ordered your Tower Site Calendar 2003 yet? That spiffy
image of the WBEN transmitter site on Grand Island is just one
of a dozen exciting images...and it's accompanied by many others
(including Providence's WHJJ; Mount Mansfield, Vermont; KOMA
in Oklahoma City; the legendary WSM, Nashville; WGN, Chicago
and many more), more dates in radio history, a convenient hole
for hanging - and we'll even make sure all the dates fall on
the right days!
This year's calendar is currently shipping! Calendars
are in stock, and orders placed now will ship within 24 hours!
And this year, you can order with your Visa, MasterCard, Discover
or American Express by using the handy link below!
Better yet, here's an incentive to make your 2003 NERW subscription
pledge: support NERW/fybush.com at the $60 level or higher, and
you'll get this lovely calendar for free! How can you
go wrong? (Click here
to visit our Support page, where you can make your NERW contribution
with a major credit card...)
You can also order by mail; just send a check for $16
per calendar (NYS residents add 8% sales tax), shipping included,
to Scott Fybush, 92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester
NY 14618.
International orders: Calendars are US$18 to Canada,
US$20 to the rest of the world, postage included. Send checks/international
money orders (in US dollars) to the address above, or e-mail
for credit-card ordering information.
*And we're also happy to announce that
our good friends at M Street have released the 11th edition of
the M Street Radio Directory. With the disappearance
of the old Vane Jones log and the declining accuracy of the Broadcasting
Yearbook, the M Street directory is widely regarded as the most
accurate, most comprehensive source of information on the US
and Canadian radio scene - and we're thrilled to be able to offer
it to you at a substantial discount!
The directory includes power, frequency, ownership, key personnel,
formats, ratings and much more information for every radio station
in the U.S. and Canada, and now runs almost 900 pages in an 8.5"
x 11" softcover book. List price is $79 (plus $7 shipping/handling),
but if you order through fybush.com/NorthEast Radio Watch, you
can get this invaluable resource on your shelf for $69 (plus
$7 s/h) - a $10 savings! And your purchase benefits the continued
publication of NERW and Tower Site of the Week, so everybody
wins!
You can order in either of two ways: to order by major credit
card, call 1-800-248-4242, ask for Irene, and tell her
you want the "NorthEast Radio Watch" discount. Or,
send check or money order for $76 ($69 + $7 s/h) to Scott Fybush,
92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester NY 14618. Either way, you'll put
the most trusted, accurate information about the radio industry
in print today on your bookshelf.
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2003 by Scott Fybush. |