Car Radios As Audio Tools

I'd inquired to Dave M. about when he mentioned using car radios, why so? And his reply below:

"Back in the day, you either had a car radio or you didn’t. About the only option you had with a car radio was to have a rear seat speaker with a front-to-back fader. Car radios were made by Philco (if you owned a Ford) or by DELCO (if you owned a Chevy). Purely subjective listening tests taught us a couple of things about these two radio brands. The DELCO’s were the best at picking up stations at a distance but the Philco’s had the best sound.

So using all the subjective talent we could muster, we would “tweak” the audio of KAAY using a Philco car radio as the listening post. We knew that if it sounded good on a Philco car radio, it HAD to sound good on just about everything else!

But if you wanted to listen to a radio station on the dark side of Mars, get a DELCO.

We had a lot of little audio tools and tricks we used to tweak the audio. Our goal was to be the best sounding 50kW station on the dial, including all those “big city” stations. Wayne Moss (Wayne Moss) had an exceptionally good ear and audio intuition, and he was constantly asking for a little more of this, a little less of that, etc., and we were glad to oblige. Some days, we would make a little audio tweak, and then run out to the car radio to see how it sounded. We didn’t use the studio monitors because we wanted to see how things sounded to Mr. Average Joe Public.

Wayne would be a most excellent resource to coax into contributing to the blog – his tenure spanned both the early days of KAAY as well as into the 70’s and he knew most of the people mentioned on the blog to date.

/DM/"

And I sure would like to hear from Wayne Moss...on ANY subject! Thank you, Dave!

Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com)