WQIV Aircheck

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zabble

1K Club - QQ Shooting Star
Since 2002/2003
Joined
Mar 1, 2003
Messages
1,198
Location
Chicago
Many of us here are familiar with the quad radio station WQIV that ran out of New York for a short time. They were host to several live quadraphonic broadcasts of in-studio performances of the likes of Rush, the Guess Who, Hot Tuna, and others. I personally never had the chance to hear the station. Did they play exclusively quad material? Did they encode stereo material to broadcast in simulated quad? What would you hear when listening to that station? These are questions to which I don’t know the answer.

Interestingly, I stumbled upon the following ebay listing offering an aircheck of the first few hours of WQIV’s birth on the air. According to the listing, the seller recorded the transition from classical station WNCN into quadraphonic station WQIV using a reel to reel recorder. The bad news is that the recorder was mono. This is rather unfortunate as I’d like to be able to see how good the encoding was. Nonetheless, I figured someone here would be interested.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270583155457&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:US:1123

There’s even a ten minute sample on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcbYEgMdoaQ

The sample is mostly of WNCN before the transition. If you want to hear the back story behind WNCN’s fight to remain a classical station, it is well worth listening to. However if you want to get right to the change to WQIV, skip ahead to about 8:20. Strangely, the very first song they play was never released in quad (it is however appropriate given the back story). In addition to the broadcast being recorded in mono, another minus is that it’s offered in mp3 format. That said, it might be worth the $10 BIN price just to hear the very first four hours of the historic quad station WQIV.

And no, I do not have any affiliation with the seller. :)
 
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