Once again answering the questions that no one asks Gospel Aircheck comes to the rescue! How exactly is an aircheck made. Well, I’m glad you asked. The most simple method is using a component stereo system or boombox with a built in tape recorder and an AM/FM radio and rolling tape on your favorite radio station. An unattended recording of a station is called an unscoped aircheck. You see ‘scoped is short for telescoped, which is technical jargon for an edited recording of a program:often with commercials, music, and ID’s removed leaving the DJ’s voice only. Therefore, “unscoped” has not been edited. The problem with editing from one tape to another is that some audio quality is lost. The upside is that you never miss anything in an unscoped aircheck. Of course, this quality reduction only applies to analog tape. Certainly you could hover over the pause button and edit on the fly, but miscues are inevitable with live programming.
Most of the recordings I made of my own DJ shows were on analog cassette tape made on professional equipment directly from the source, the station’s soundboard. The resulting recordings are vastly superior to what is possible on any consumer gear, especially the lowly boombox. The problem I have with recordings of this type is that they are often too good. They don’t sound like authentic (gritty) over-the-air broadcasts. By the late 1980’s I started recording from the station’s modulation monitor, which is a fancy very expensive radio tuner that broadcasters use to listen to their signal. A modulation monitor is factory preset to receive one frequency, your own. Capturing broadcasts this way not only preserves content it gives a representation of signal quality as well. Naturally, hobbyists don’t have the luxury of a direct recording; but I have recently read about software that automatically digitally records radio shows just like VCR’s and DVR’s have done years for TV. So far only Internet radio streaming, not old fashioned AM/FM, is covered.
I switched to digital editing of my analog originals in 1995 and never looked back. Happy airchecking!
Stay tuned
©2010 Neal Rhoden. Gospel Aircheck blog. All rights reserved.
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