Man radio Sucks

I'm an old radio guy, haven't been in the business for 6 years, I don't listen to commercial radio very often, but yesterday, I listened to KOST-FM during our half hour drive to our friend Ann's birthday party.

One of KOST's positioning statements is "Your favorites from the 80's, 90's and today."

Okay, a decade is ten years and we're 16 years into a new century, maybe I'm being picky, but that's, on the surface anyway, kind of a stupid thing to say, isn't it?

I have no idea who produced KOST's ID package, they're terrible and irrelevant, they don't fit the station and they're poorly produced.

Speaking of production, the audio levels of KOST are all over the spectrum. The mic was too loud, some of the music was too low, the commercials were loud and harsh. KOST's audio is just terrible. The high end is shrill, the bottom end is muddy and the midrange is squeezed to death, none of it worked. KOST is hard to listen to, very hard.

We heard a commercial set, with a live intro, into a produced station promo, then 8 commercials another produced promo and then a live liner read over the intro of a song. After the first song of the music set ended, the jock read another liner over the intro to the next song. Once again the audio mix was so garbled, it was hard to understand, something about a ticket give away.

In the middle of the music sweep, guess what popped up after some over produced piece of music from today? "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison, a hit in 1967, followed by Madonna's "Lucky Star". It made my teeth ache. The jock then hyped the ticket giveaway again. When he finally revealed the ticket giveaway a few songs later, it was for a concert at the OC Fair, which is months away. Exciting? No it wasn't.

We finally gave up on KOST and switched over to 95.5 KLOS the classic rock station. "Rock you like a Hurricane" by the Scorpions was playing. Once again the audio was so bad about a 1/3rd of the music came out of the speakers. The sound was muddy and shrill at the same time, hard to create an audio mix like that, ask an engineer, they'll say, "it's damn near impossible". Somehow in 2016 radio gets it done.

When I look back on my years in radio, it's not always as good as I remember or I'd like it to be, but Jesus people at least we gave it a try and put some effort into it.

I was relieved when we shut off the radio when we arrived at Ann's party. On the way home we listened to music I've downloaded into the car's infotainment system. It made for a pleasant drive home and the audio was perfect.