by Leslie Stimson, 9.20.2007
Leslie Stimson is the News Editor and Washington Bureau Chief for Radio World.
AM is sexy at the NRSC.
Here’s an exclusive to this report: There’s big doings upcoming when the standards body meets next Wednesday in Charlotte — five votes expected in one day. There haven’t been that many votes in a day since the big action on the IBOC standard, I’m told.
What’s happening? AM standards are getting a makeover.
The AM Subcommittee has spent the last three years working on revising those standards. Now the work is done, says committee co-chair Stan Salek of Hammett & Edison.
The group has revised NRSC-1 (AM preemphasis/deemphasis and broadcast audio bandwidth specifications) and NRSC-2 (emission limitation for AM broadcast transmission).
It’s also proposing to delete NRSC-3 (audio bandwidth and distortion recommendations for AM broadcast receivers) and move the receiver response curves, the most relevant portion of the standard, into NRSC-1, according to Salek.
The standards, now in draft form, also have been updated to incorporate IBOC information.
A lot of what the group has done here is streamline and update the voluntary standards. Much of that text was last written to accommodate AMAX, the promotional program to get receiver manufacturers to produce radios that had increased bandwidth. Remember that? The idea was to improve the AM part of the receiver. (In fact, Stan and I both worked at NAB during that time, and AMAX was a big deal then.)
You can read the current standards on the NRSC site. The new ones will be posted sometime after the show, NAB tells me.
(RW Online)