DaveW ) writes:
William Sommerwerck wrote:

HiFi AM is stretching the definition of HiFi! Designing and building
a good receiver is not a trivial task. When I was a kid in Jr High and
didn't know any better I used whatever was at hand or I could scrounge
and most projects usually worked, and even worked better when
certain parts were substituted by trial and error. But in reality none
compared to the war surplus receivers I converted.


Last year I sold an old (but never-used) Sony stereo AM radio (for seven times
what I paid for it). Checking it out, I located a local stereo AM station.
Tuning was tricky -- you had to find _just_ the right spot. But had I not known
it was AM, it might very well have thought it FM. The sound was _that_ good.
Certainly hi-fi in the subjective sense of low distortion and coloration.

FM has a major advantage over AM that can be summed up in one word -- limiting.
You can get perfectly flat response without having a perfectly flat IF strip.



May I assume that the station was actually playing music on AM? Funny
thing, the original Mopar radio in my car had AM stereo. Back before I
replaced it (2001, cassette deck went dead), there were several stations
boadcasting in AM stereo, all of them talk or news. Perhaps there was
music on some of the foreign language stations, I didn't check them.
IIRC, the one station that was broadcasting music in English at that
time, was in mono.

In any event, I think clearly that the thing that killed AM stereo is
the lack of music being broadcast on AM by the time it became available.
Weather, traffic and Terror (TM) reports, are just fine in mono.

Regards,

DAve

Of course what you really mean is that AM has ceased to be for entertainment.

I suspect old time radio (if done in stereo), any "radio theatre", and comedy
skits like Cheech and Chong would benefit from being broadcast in stereo.

Michael