WHAT'

It’s a classical “juke box, says this author,
lagging far behind its European counterparts

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"YOU AMERICANS had the technical ability to produce FM, but it takes us and the Europeans to show you how to use it.”

The speaker was B. F. Fediuk, a senior engineer at the Moscow Television Laboratories, and his view is a common one among broadcasters throughout Eastern and Western Europe. Is the United States lagging in the development and use of high-fidelity distortion-free FM broadcasting? Even the most partisan observer would be forced to answer in the affirmative.

A few figures help tell the story. At the beginning of 1950, there were only four FM stations in all of war-torn Europe. The strongest of these, a station in Copenhagen, operated with a power of only 800 watts—less than that used by 70% of America’s AM and FM stations. Today, over 1000 European stations are operating in an area about the same size as the United States. And the strongest boasts a power 150 times that of the 1950 Copenhagen station.

Meanwhile, the number of American FM stations declined from a high of 1020, late in 1948, to 912 as of a year or so ago. In other words, while the number of European FM stations increased by more than 250 times, the American total actually decreased by 10%.

Throughout Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, FM has gained wider popular acceptance and wider usage than it has in the land of its birth. In Britain, France, the Netherlands, East and West Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Austria, even the Soviet Union, nationwide government-owned FM networks are the rule rather than the exception.

In many cases, the broadcasters have had to overcome handicaps of language, politics, and financing to develop true high-fidelity programming. And because FM has gained such wide public acceptance, European broadcasters have felt justified in spending money to develop high-quality FM transmitters and microwave relays for program transmission.

In the United States, broadcasting’s “Big Three”-the Columbia Broadcasting System, the National Broadcasting Company, and the American Broadcasting Company-have argued that public indifference to good sound on the air waves has prevented them from using high-fidelity telephone lines to link one affiliated station to another.

Using a top-quality tuner, one FM station can pick up and rebroadcast the full-frequency signal from a station as far away as 50 miles; such American organizations as the Concert Network and the WQXR Network have done so in relatively small areas of the United States. But no American FM network is currently using microwave relay, because the broadcasters feel its cost is prohibitive. Yet such a system would allow full-frequency transmission over much greater distances.

An indication of what can be done with FM can be found in the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française operations. France has three AM networks and four FM webs. Listeners to Paris/Inter-France I and Regional France II hear the same broadcasts of pop music, sports, comedy, and light drama on AM and FM (although RTF officials say most are AM listeners).

National France III, which features more serious music and drama as well as educational programs, is also an AM/FM network, but it is estimated that perhaps two-thirds of its listeners tune in on FM. The high-fidelity network, France IV, is all FM and features live and recorded music-not only opera, symphony, and chamber music, but jazz, popular, and dance music by France’s top artists as well.

By European standards, France got a late start in FM, with a single transmitter beaming broadcasts from the top of the Eiffel Tower to Paris and its suburbs only a few years ago. Today, there are no less than 38 FM outlets serving the four networks, with plans for more in the immediate future. A hallmark of the French system (as of other European systems) is the use of microwave relay to provide the full (50-151000 cycles) spectrum to every station in each network.

The French acknowledge the higher cost compared to telephone lines. But, they point out, “FM enables the listener to hear everything there is. Eventually, people are going to demand top quality, so we may as well give it to them now. The audience for FM here is already large enough to warrant the expense of public money for a relay system, in our opinion.” An RTF estimate suggests that about 400,000 Frenchmen (out of 45 million) own FM sets ”a remarkable figure when you consider that there were virtually none at the beginning of 1958.”

Almost every FM/TV operation in the United States has better facilities than Austria’s state-run broadcasting system (there is only one TV studio in all of Austria, for example). Yet the Austrian system provides one FM transmitter for every 280,000 Austrians-a ratio only slightly less than the U. S. rate of one transmitter for ev-ery 251,000 citizens.

Although Austria was one of the last nations to recover from the effects of World War II, it began FM transmissions as early as 1953 from a single station in Vienna. Today, it has a potential audience of one million.

An engineering director at Radio Wien comments, “FM is important in Austria because it is the most effective way of servicing remote or isolated communities in the Alps. It is important to city dwellers because they can listen to our programs with little interference from stations in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Germany.”

“Such interference,” he continues, “can be intolerable on the AM band in Vienna after nightfall, and was one of the reasons we went to FM in the first place. Soon, our musically inclined listeners discovered that FM not only eliminated interference from other radio stations and from atmospheric conditions, but that it also enabled them to hear all the nuances of the music.”

As in most other European countries, Austrian listeners pay for what they hear through an annual license issued by the Post Office. “Because they pay for the service,” a government spokesman adds, “they feel they have a right to make demands, such as high fidelity.”

When Austria added low-powered FM transmitters located on Alpine slopes to its two networks, it found that microwave relays in many cases were impractical. “Where it is possible,” says the spokesman, “we do relay the signal from one station to another. Where it is not, we use first-class telephone lines. The result is a signal from every transmitter out to 15,000 cycles.”

Nearby Germany has found that FM broadcasts, FM radios, and the tape recorder have become involved in a “chicken-and-egg” affair. “It’s hard to say where the stress on high fidelity came from,” a director of city-owned Radio Free Berlin (SFB) states.

“At the end of 1949,” he explains, “Germany was still down and out from the effects of the war. We had only two FM stations-one in Munich and one in Hamburg. We found, as the Cold War grew colder, that there was increasing interference with our AM stations- through jamming in the East and through the addition of hundreds of new stations to the band throughout Europe. It became obvious that something would have to be done.”

When West Germany regained its sovereignty in 1955, it took over the stations which had been set up by the American, British, and French occupational authorities in their zones-including several FM transmitters. At the same time, German radio manufacturers, pushed by the quality of FM broadcasts at home and in markets abroad such as the United States, were producing top-quality FM table and console receivers. Thus, FM became an important part of virtually every radio or console manu-factured in Germany from 1955 on, because domestic customers wanted it.

Top-quality radios meant that broadcasters had to offer top-quality programming. “We were unable to lay a cable between Berlin and the West which the Communists would agree not to touch,” the SFB man explains, “so we were forced to use microwave relay. Its advantages became so obvious that it was used elsewhere in Germany. This meant that listeners in Munich or Frankfurt could hear the Berlin Philharmonic with all the fidelity available to a listener in the hall. The radio sets reproduced it and the public demanded it.”

No less than nine FM networks compete for the attention of German listeners. In addition to the two offered by Germany’s affiliated state-owned stations, there are the programs of the American Armed Forces Network, the British Forces Network, the French Forces Network, Radio Volga (for Soviet occupation troops), and the stations in East Germany. An independent station, Radio in the American Sector in West Berlin (RIAS), makes two more programs available to listeners in the former German capital.

Despite their often inferior quality and signal strength, stations in the armed forces networks are strong favorites with many German listeners, particularly those partial to rock-and-roll and American jazz. So popular are the broadcasts, in fact, that they are credited by the German record and music-publishing industries with being a major cause for the country’s interest in tape recorders.

According to industry figures, one out of every 18 West Germans owns a tape recorder (about three times the ratio in the United States). And pop music men feel that last year’s decline in pop record sales was a direct result of tapes being made off the air by young Germans!

Although most West Germans have grown calloused to the continued bland-ishments of East German propagandists broadcasting on FM, they are quite will-ing to listen to-and record-vocal and instrumental recitals, concerts by East German orchestras, and performances of operas by the East Berlin or Dresden opera houses from East German stations. As it happens, the Communists have cornered much of Germany’s best musical talent through the simple capitalist expedient of outbidding West German opera houses, broadcasters, and orches-tras for their services.

“If the broadcast originates with the station to which you’re listening,” says a music lover in West Berlin, “the quality is, if anything, superior to that of SFB or RIAS, both of which have beautiful new transmitters and record-playing equipment.”

If Western Europe is doing this well with FM, how are the Russians doing? According to Russian engineer B. F. Fediuk (mentioned earlier), FM has replaced AM in most urban centers in the Soviet Union. A ring of low-powered FM stations provides the main news, weather, entertainment, and propaganda service for each major city. The ring serving Moscow, for example, said to be 50 miles in diameter, covers suburbs and nearby cities as well.

These FM transmitters pick up and re-transmit each other’s programs, much as the Concert Network does in the United States. This means that programs of local origin are transmitted with a frequency spread of 50-15,000 cycles. However, relays of programs over long distances-the 500 miles from Moscow to Leningrad, for example, or the 400 miles from Kiev to Odessa-are left to a few 100- to 150-kw. AM stations supplemented by low-quality telephone lines. The former also service listeners in Russia’s vast rural areas.

Nor is all of the progress in FM taking place in Europe. Canada claims only one-twentieth as many FM stations as the United States-yet it has one of the longest FM networks on the continent. Linked together by first-class telephone land lines are government-owned stations in French/English speaking Montreal and Ottawa, and in English speaking Toronto.

“The problem,” says Laurence Wilson, one of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s FM network program directors, “is to satisfy not only all types of listeners, but to provide programs which will satisfy two different language groups, each of which has its separate and distinct culture.”

The CBC is solving the problem by keeping the FM network primarily for good music, with annotations in both French and English. Until recently, the three stations which make up the FM network duplicated the CBC’s AM programming. “We decided, two years ago,” says Wilson, “that the growing number of people who own FM sets were entitled to hear some-thing different. We asked ourselves what FM could do that AM couldn’t, and the answer was high-fidelity music. So we spent money on first-class telephone lines and first-class equipment.”

To sum up, FM has already replaced AM as a primary program source in the population centers of the Soviet Union, and it threatens to do so throughout much of Western Europe. But American broadcasters have yet to establish the first national FM hi-fidelity network, or to put FM to some of the imaginative uses it has abroad.

Does this mean that American FM is hopelessly outclassed by its international competition? Not at all, in the author’s opinion. But action must be taken now-by the broadcasters, by the Federal Communications Commission, by sponsors, and by FM listeners.

The FCC has shown great interest in recent months in helping FM become a truly national service. Currently, the Commission is studying an overall plan for future station allotment which will guarantee to listeners of each FM station a signal free from interference by other nearby stations. In the same vein, the agency is trying to determine whether continued duplication of the same program on AM and FM fills a public need and can further the growth of FM as a separate communications medium.

What can be done to improve FM broadcasting? Is there some way to help American FM come of age? Here is an eight-point program designed by the author to help America’s privately owned FM stations keep pace with govern-ment-owned networks abroad.

• Use FM rather than AM as a primary program source in American urban centers where a limited signal can reach large numbers of people. Such practice will immediately improve the technical quality of much of American radio. By switching to FM, many of the daytime-only AM stations which serve the sub-urbs of our larger cities can provide their listeners with true high-fidelity sound. At the same time, the withdrawal of these stations from the AM band will enable a few high-powered AM stations to provide an interference-free national broadcast service for listeners in smaller towns and cities as well as on farms. The daytime-only stations will benefit by being able to extend their broadcast schedules into the evening hours and thus extend their areas of coverage.

• Set a maximum period of ten years for the above changeover. During this period, manufacturers should be given tax incentives to produce AM/FM radios, tuners, and consoles. Such incentives would lower the prices of combination units to the public, thus encouraging people to buy them. Broadcasters would be free to duplicate programming on both AM and FM, but would be required to drop one service or the other before the end of the ten-year period.

• Establish and actively police minimum standards for FM. Despite existing regulations, many an FM station today is overmodulating its signal. In others, distortion is at an intolerable level. Better than half of all FM stations on the air fail to transmit frequencies much above 8000 or below 100 cycles; since one of the purposes of FM is to transmit a full-frequency signal, why should broadcasters transmitting only a limited-frequency signal be allowed precious space in the FM spectrum?

• Encourage the growth of FM networks-not just small regional webs, crossing a state line or two, but truly national networks, which would allow a listener in Seattle or Santa Barbara (Calif.) to enjoy the Metropolitan Opera live and in stereo; or to hear a similar broadcast in New York originating from the Hollywood Bowl. Such networks could be set up today in one of three ways: by direct FM relay from station to station, by microwave relay, or by Class-A telephone lines. Live program-ming should be an important part of FM-and it can be, if broadcasters will co-operate to finance a network or lend their facilities to direct relays.

• Insist upon good, live programming. If the AM band has become the home of rock-and-roll, much of the FM band is nothing more than a classical juke box. American radio listeners are entitled to more than Bach or a beat-they’re entitled to network news, to public service features, to quality comedy, to serious discussion, to plays, to exchange programs from abroad. The Federal Communications Commission has a responsibility to the public to insure that would-be broadcasters not merely copy a successful program format, but provide some of the things now missing from radio. The job of producing some of these programs is too big and too expensive for any one local station. But a number of them could pro-duce such material by forming a cooperative or a network.

• It would seem to be incumbent on the Federal Communications Commission to see that those it licenses to broadcast have the financial resources to provide a varied diet of program material; that they be able to afford first-class broadcast equipment; and that they have the resources to cooperate with other broadcasters in creating network facilities. It would also seem to be incumbent on others in the industry to encourage station managements to use profits for fur-thering technical facilities and/or providing better programs.

• The FCC has authorized stereocasts on a permissive basis-i.e., a station may stereocast if it desires, but it need not do so. Would it be improper for the FCC to ask, on its license renewal forms, just how much stereocasting a station has done and how much it plans to do? At the same time, action by the public in the form of letters to broadcasters and local sponsors would help put more stereo on the air.

• There are several ways American FM stations could finance these developments and improvements-one of which would be by using secondary multiplex carriers for supplementary services. A number of stations are already using these channels for background music services. A very few are using them to relay programs from station to station.

The National Broadcasting Company has pointed the way toward another profit-making, useful service-special programs of news and music for doctors. This idea could be expanded to provide services-or at least programs-for any number of similar groups, such as daily legal news for lawyers, a running commentary from the floor of stock exchanges for the nation’s brokers; a special service for beauticians, and so on. Not only would it be a mistake from a revenue point of view to let these side channels go to waste; it would deny an otherwise useful service to a number of minority groups.

In short, FM was developed and pioneered in America. But unless American free-enterprise broadcasters are careful, European government-owned systems will leave them even farther behind in its use and future development. Now is the time for planning and action!