Magic 1278 Quality Issues

Seems to be a controversy that some Melbourne AM stations have
worse quality now than a while back
This air check recorded off air on an AM3 tuner with audio and spectrum
shows the difference form a recent recording and one made in 2006.
The change over is at 1.20 in
The recent recording shows a cut off at 5Khz while the older one has full
audio response to 15K.
The audio is a bit "gurgled" due to the Youtube conversion.
but even so the difference is marked.
99% of the audience would not have radios that would
be able to tell the difference but what is the point
of such a restricting of bandwidth. Most other stations in
this market have audio to 9Khz, that can sound very good.
It must be said that Magic 1278 is the only main stream
music format AM station in Melbourne but has worse quality than the talk sport stations except their sister station 3AW that has the same restricted audio response.
Who cares anyway , i don't as i got tired of golden oldies
years ago and 90% of my listening is off the net or DAB any how, but you would think the station engineers might
like to keep the quality as high as possible for the medium

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Magic
• 1278
• AM
• radio
• modulation
• broadcast
• band

[AccordionManiac]

Was the 2006 audio captured from the AM signal? That 2006 audio sounds absolutely incredible... I thought AM couldn't sound so good, apart from AM Stereo?

Can't get decent 1278 reception, I always get noise from some other stations or whatever it is (I'm not Awful. Don't know what's better: the AM 1278 sound or their 16kbps wma stream.

[vk3ase]

Recorded from an  AWA AM 3 tuner. This is the way AM should sound.

[TheExEngineer]

Great Video. I too thought that Magic's sound quality has changed sometime after moving to 1278KHz, I thought at first their techs were mucking about with compression to try and get a "louder" sound. This fiddling was immediately prior to their being sold to Fairfax. I had a lot of time for their station manager when they were owned by Souhern Cross, I think he really cared about their sound ( I do know he wanted AM stereo to be re-instated) but I suspect that money and politics won the day.

[AccordionManiac]

@vk3ase I'll have to wait to get a digital radio to hear Magic in all its glory, eh?

[servros]

No doubt that it's substandard now. I wonder what the deal is.

[speer320]

Maybe they are trying to push people to DAB+