It was just over a year ago that your intrepid Toppy Northeast Guy invaded a new market for the site, picking up a whole slew of IDs from Bakersfield, California.
Twelve months and change later, I’m finally getting around to putting some of that audio up here, and some pictures up over at Tower Site of the Week.
And by now, a fair number of the AM stations you’ll hear this week are history. KHTY 970 went from “W Radio” en espanol to Fox Sports in English. News-talk KERN traded its longtime home on 1410, with good in-city coverage, for the wide-reaching 1180 signal that used to be religious KERI. KWAC 1490 has moved towers.
We’ve also got a few bonus IDs, via DX and translators, from the Fresno market to the north, where KGED 1680 has since flipped from the standards format heard here to Spanish oldies.
There have been FM flips aplenty in the Central Valley, too, but we’ll get to those next week when we post more IDs and more pictures.
(Regular Toppy contributor Garrett Wollman was in on that April 2008 trip, too, and so you get an opportunity here to compare his all-digital airchecking approach, using a pair of Marantz PMD620 recorders, to my still-painfully-cassette-bound system. I can do more IDs each hour than he can…but his tend to sound a lot better and don’t get lost as easily. Will someone ever come out with a good radio paired with a good digital recorder that can be set up with multiple timer events?)
You can do more IDs per hour than I can because you have more decks running at a time than I do. If I could practically keep track of three audio sources simultaneously, I would be able to get quite a bit more done. As it is, it’s difficult enough to keep track of what I’m doing when you have four decks going on speaker simultaneously.
The other major difference in our processes, of course, is that I edit on the fly, so I need to be able to identify what each station is doing — and I only have two ears. That’s why I’m able to send stuff to Toppy a week after I get home and you have to take the time to play back your 45-minute unscoped airchecks and pull the IDs out manually.
Oh, one other reason why my stuff “tends to sound better” is that I don’t bother with the stuff that doesn’t…. Call it publication bias, if you will. I think the radios I use also make a meaningful difference.
On AM, absolutely – a Sony SRF-59 certainly delivers better audio than the somewhat pinched AM section of the 1000Ts I use. But we’re both using the same FM section on the 1000T, so that shouldn’t be a factor.
As for biases, mine is toward completeness over quality, especially for places I may never get back to, like El Centro and Yuma. I’d rather have a lousy KBLU ID than no KBLU ID at all…