I remember in the early to mid 80’s when AM stereo came out. I never got a chance to hear it but have allways been curious if it’s any good or not. One of the reasons I heard it never caught on big was because there was no standard for it. I though maybe it died out, but a couple of years ago, I saw a walkman, I think it was, that had AM stereo, but I couldn’t afford it at the time. Anyway, I’m still curious, is it a big improvement, or not?
http://www.fcc.gov/mmb/asd/bickel/amstereo.html
The Kahn system was operated as an experiment for several years in the 60’s and 70’s on XETRA in Tijuana.
The Motorola C-Quam system finally was declared a standard in 1993, but by then it was too late. Most of the general public had chosen to listen to music on FM radio and many AM stations had started narrowcasting with talk/news, foreign language and other formats.
Sony did come out with a radio that could get the three different AM stereo signals in the 80’s but the unit never was a popular seller and was discontinued.
Would AM Stereo be as resistent to interference and distance as its Mono counterpart? You can get AM from thousands of miles away on a clear night, whereas FM pretty much is limited to a very local area.
According to my 2001 copy of the UK “Radio Listeners Guide” there will soon be digital AM radio on short,medium and long waves. An international standard has been agreed and this will enable all the advantages of digital radio to be obtained on these bands.This includes not only stereo but text data as well.The official start for digital broadcasts in the frequency bands below 30Mhz is at the Worl Radio Conference in 2003.
I didn’t know that they tried it in the 60’s and 70’s. I never even heard about it untill the mid 80’s (well, I wasn’t alive in the 60’s and I would have been to young in the 70’s to know much about it anyway) but in 1984 my mother and I moved to Oregon, and not to long after, an AM radio station we liked listening to, I’m forgetting the call letters…something like KWIP I think, anyway, it was claiming to be the first AM radio station in Oregon, maybe even the north west,to broadcast in stereo.