Halford & Brough to 650

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Halford & Brough to 650

Postby Aaron » Thu Mar 25, 2021 3:19 pm

https://media.sportsnet.ca/2021/03/spor ... -march-29/

Sportsnet 650 Introduces New Weekday Lineup, Starting March 29
– Local fan-favourites Mike Halford and Jason Brough sign on to anchor SN650 morning drive show –
– Radio veteran Karen Surman to co-host midday timeslot alongside Scott Rintoul for both Vancouver and Calgary stations –
– Don Taylor to join SN650 as regular contributor to the afternoon drive show with new co-hosts Satiar Shah, Dan Riccio and Randip Janda –
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Re: Halford & Brough to 650

Postby cart_machine » Thu Mar 25, 2021 5:25 pm

I guess the other shoe dropping in this story is that James Cybulski and Andrew Walker are gone.

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Re: Halford & Brough to 650

Postby Coolcat » Sat Mar 27, 2021 2:02 pm

Had to happen everytime I listened in I heard more music than sports for some crazy reason. Surprised the two hosts lasted this long.
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Re: Halford & Brough to 650

Postby GrumpyOldMan » Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:15 am

It’s funny you should mention that music bit, because I had heard a couple of years ago, PPM measurement was blanking talk, unless it was during commercial breaks with music, or musical rejoinders. This would obviously be a huge problem for talk formats, and I know that at TSN, they were exploring the idea of longer music beds and even talk beds. Has anyone else in the tech space heard this?
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Re: Halford & Brough to 650

Postby Aaron » Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:46 pm

GrumpyOldMan wrote:It’s funny you should mention that music bit, because I had heard a couple of years ago, PPM measurement was blanking talk, unless it was during commercial breaks with music, or musical rejoinders. This would obviously be a huge problem for talk formats, and I know that at TSN, they were exploring the idea of longer music beds and even talk beds. Has anyone else in the tech space heard this?


I've heard that too, but I don't think it's still true if it ever was. Would be hard to explain high CBC and NPR ratings.

A station I oversee has a talk-heavy morning show, and our PPM monitoring software doesn't raise any alarms for that time period.
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Re: Halford & Brough to 650

Postby groundskeeper willy » Mon Apr 12, 2021 7:20 pm

When PPM was originally rolled out, there were problems with talk stations claiming faulty ratings, and it was due to the technology at the time. For music stations, the PPM watermark signal has plenty of frequencies to be masked with, so the strength of the watermark can be boosted up, which pretty much ensures that the listener's PPM receiver will capture and log the signal.

Talk stations found that they had to keep the watermark signal low, as there was no way to really mask the watermark during silence (ie the normal pauses during conversation). While the watermark is technically inaudible, if the watermark signal was too high, it could create audible artifacting as it was being pushed through the station's processing chain. So talk stations had to find that balance point where they still had PPM encoding but it wasn't compromising the signal heading out the transmitter, and that point was sometimes too low to be captured properly. Hence the P.O.'ed PD's at stations that suffered with flawed ratings during the early days of PPM.

Really isn't much of an issue anymore, thanks to the pointy-headed engineering nerds who've done the math and fine-tuned the encode software that now works like it's suppose to. Sure, there are still occasional problems with ratings 'glitches', but that's usually a result of equipment not being calibrated correctly at station level.
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Re: Halford & Brough to 650

Postby GrumpyOldMan » Tue Apr 13, 2021 5:18 pm

groundskeeper willy wrote:When PPM was originally rolled out, there were problems with talk stations claiming faulty ratings, and it was due to the technology at the time. For music stations, the PPM watermark signal has plenty of frequencies to be masked with, so the strength of the watermark can be boosted up, which pretty much ensures that the listener's PPM receiver will capture and log the signal.

Talk stations found that they had to keep the watermark signal low, as there was no way to really mask the watermark during silence (ie the normal pauses during conversation). While the watermark is technically inaudible, if the watermark signal was too high, it could create audible artifacting as it was being pushed through the station's processing chain. So talk stations had to find that balance point where they still had PPM encoding but it wasn't compromising the signal heading out the transmitter, and that point was sometimes too low to be captured properly. Hence the P.O.'ed PD's at stations that suffered with flawed ratings during the early days of PPM.

Really isn't much of an issue anymore, thanks to the pointy-headed engineering nerds who've done the math and fine-tuned the encode software that now works like it's suppose to. Sure, there are still occasional problems with ratings 'glitches', but that's usually a result of equipment not being calibrated correctly at station level.


This is a great explanation! Thank you.
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