So, a few years ago, we said goodbye to the Brisbane institution that was Classic Hits 4KQ… with the decision of some Sydney bright sparks at Here, There & Everywhere, owners of Australian Radio Network, acquiring rival network Grant Broadcasting and merging the two together. This put ARN over their quota for the number of stations they were allowed to operate in the Brisbane region, and so they sold off their oldest to the Sports Entertainment Network.
That pretty much ended my all-day radio listening right there. The presenters from 4KQ’s morning show wound up on 4BC, but that’s about as much as was left of the old station. Well of course no good thing can last forever, and so Laurel, Gary & Mark broadcast their final show this morning. I will admit there was a bit of sadness as Greenday’s “Time Of Your Life” played (in place of Laurel’s Last Word)… then cron on my desktop PC muted qt-dab at 0900… it was time for me to get to work myself.
Peter Fegan takes over that shift on the 30th… and I for one, won’t be tuning in. 4BC now has nothing to offer me.
I had a quick tune around of the DAB+ and FM stations… to see what was on offer.
B105 is not worth bothering with, and haven’t been for the better part of 30 years now, such is the sad state of top-40 music these days. Sister station Triple M was a station I was listening to a lot at the early part of the century. Southern Cross Austereo runs both, as well as a stack of DAB+ only stations, however, the DAB+ stations are all at 32kbps. 48kbps is just tolerable for audio quality on the stereo here… and through headphones I can barely notice some compression distortion. 32kbps is okay for voice, but sounds terrible for music, ringing left-right and centre. So if I go to one of those stations, it’ll be via FM not DAB+.
In my hopping around, I came across one station that was broadcasting at 24kbps… through the speaker on my little portable DAB+ set I could hear the ringing artefacts. Not as bad as Coles TAS (at 16kbps!), but still bloody terrible! I didn’t realise there was a step between 16kbps and 32kbps… but I stand by my comment that 32kbps is the bare minimum for music… with 48kbps and above highly recommended.
4BC’s sister station 4BH actually adopted a lot of 4KQ’s old format… so for now I’ve set qt-dab up there. The main reason why I went to 4BC is the morning show, I had a choice to make: the people or the format… and so I decided to stick with “the people” for the morning, figuring I can fill the rest of my day with my own music. That’s what I’ve been doing the past couple of years. With “the people” gone, I’m now left with “the format” as the deciding factor. As for audio quality, they broadcast on MW at 1116kHz or DAB+ multiplex 9B at 96kbps — one of the highest bitrate commercial DAB+ streams.
Best case scenario I guess is the intrepid trio from 4KQ pop up here… seems this is the most likely place they’d appear. That said, this is quite likely it for a radio show that’s been going for 30+ years. End of the road. While Laurel and Mark are nowhere near retirement age, I would not be surprised at all if Gary decided to hang his headphones up and officially retire, being the oldest of the three.
I’ll admit I’ve learned a lot about the music I listen to through this show. The trio were enlightening and entertaining in equal measure. I guess time will tell as to whether this really is the end, or just a change of venue.
As for me with channel hopping… I’ve flirted with the idea of starting up a station of my own, but really this is “pipe dream” material. I’d need to team up with someone who knew the media business and could serve to run the organisation, whilst I’d be focussing on the technical matters of getting things on-air. Even there, I think I’d be serving beneath someone more senior — I’d be the apprentice broadcast engineer basically. Given the deep pool of people a prospective station general manager would have to choose from, I think there’d be a lot of competition. This is a job where you measure your success by the number of knives in your back!
Worst case… I have my music, I might tune in to a news broadcast occasionally, but otherwise my radio listening days may have finally ended. We shall see.
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