Time Traveling Terry Gross

Factual Questions
1

Okay, here’s the deal. I know for a fact that this shouldn’t be happening, but it is. Repeatedly.

One example- I am walking to the beer store and listening to NPR. Fresh Air, w/ Terry Gross is on, and she’s interviewing Tim Meadows. There is some time-delayed echo-y shit going on, as well. It’s bugging me out, but I figure it my imagination or my crappy walkman.

A-HA! As the show comes back from station break, I distinctly here “This is”, quickly overlapped by a louder “This is Fresh Air”. Only the “This is” of the quiet pre-echo was audible, what with the latter being drowned out.

I have definitely heard this pre-echo at least three times, and oddly enough I think they have all been during Fresh Air. I know the signals can’t be getting to my headphones quicker than the speed of light. I know that Sony hasn’t cornered the market in tachyon receivers. I hope to good lord christ that I am not in some type of time warp.

What the hell could be causing this? At first I thought it may be some kind of audio equivalent of tv ‘ghost’ images, but I don’t see how the ghosts could be picked up before the main signal. Could it be something on Fresh Air’s side? btw, my walkman really is crapopy. A lot of times I have signal bleed from one station to another, or one frequency will be smeared along a whole range of the fm radio dial.

any help?

jb

2

Most “live” brodcasts aren’t actually live. There is a small delay put in ~1 to 10secs IIRC. What you hear as pre-ego could be a bleed thru from the actual live feed.

Or maybe not.

3

Could your radio be picking up two different NPR stations, both of which are airing the same show? Differences in how each station does its studio-to-transmitter link could create an effect like the one you describe. Maybe there’s a nearby station at 90.1 MHz and one fifty miles away at 89.9 MHz and you are picking up both. I know there are FCC regulations about overlap like this but I bet it sometimes occurs anyway.

Does this only happen with NPR? And does it only happen with Fresh Air? This would help eliminate possible explanations.

4

they also could be recording it on a bad DAT tape for playback

but then again it could be your headphones. when i got a really good signal from a really close station, i got some hissing, especially if i had the DX button on. it’d sit around some day and listen to it on a home based radio and headphones at the same time.