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I remember my first "sell" when a small town jeweler told me he hated the radio station but liked my enthusiasm and wanted some commercials on my show. Should have been a wake up call some 38 years ago! I did a good job selling myself but not a good job selling the franchise.
My one major concern is using the tools we have in the shop. You continue to quote digital Radio as if it has some magical cure. The trades are spinning digital IBOC and forgetting it has tremendous costs with no improvement whatsoever in expanding the coverage area or improving the audio delivered to most sets in use in either analog or digital mode. The pluses are again for the equipment folks. Only reason the big guys are parading IBOC is their private promises of no-royalty fees for wholesale purchases of gear. The losers in order of appearance are: ALL AM STATIONS, small market and stand alone FM stations, and the public in general who will find no difference in the audio quality of Sat radio, IBOC FM or the newly touted audio bandwidth reduction imposed on ALL Clear Channel Stations by their DOE to pave the wave for less quality on 50% of the now in use analog radios. (All Ford and most Chrysler sets are very good as are a number of European instruments.) I will personally drive over to your place and let you compare the difference in a good radio and a piece of ......found in the WOBR-GM (whore of Babylon radio by General Motors). Going FM IBOC is a good way to spend that extra money if you don't have a....clue where or who to hire as a morning guy or what to put on a billboard. But that is our contest money. It's our remote studio dollars. It's our hot-air balloon fund. It's the money we could buy new music with. But it's also the money that the publications are spewing-a joint venture from the same folks who performed with AM Stereo some 20 years ago. And I will add that AM Stereo with average receivers is far superior to anything digital. Guess you did not know that we already have Sub carrier systems that can produce up to 5 channels of separate audio up to 10khz on a conventional FM channel-quadrature component distribution. The cost of that encoder is about 8000.00 and the receiver technology is cheaper than anything digital with no digital artifacts. RBDS is working wonderfully some 15 years later. What will digital really do besides sell gear at a time when we need programming dollars and BETTER AUDIO than sat radio NOT exactly the same data and bit rate plus the other crap associated with a losing narrow band digital concept.
They tell me the best thing to do is just get a sales job pushing this gear and enjoy some commissions. I would rather entertain the less fortunate analog TV and Radio audiences for another 20 years while the selling continues.
Jerry Smith, Eng.
Are you reading this from a forwarded email?
