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Wednesday, December 9, 2009
WCRB sale to WGBH marks end of broadcast innovator
By Alan R. Earls, Special to Mass High Tech
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Greater Boston has a long history as a technology hotbed for audiophiles — it’s the original home to companies like H.H. Scott, KLH, Advent, Bose, Tivoli Audio, and others. Indeed, Dave MacNeill recalls a “hi-fi” show at Boston’s Hotel Touraine in 1954 attracting some 30,000 visitors in a single day. Intimately linked to that bit of history is the story of classical radio station WCRB, where MacNeil has been an on-air fixture for most of the past six decades.
MacNeill says his career in radio, and at WCRB in particular, was the result of several detours on his way to study civil engineering at MIT. First, there was polio. Then, after rehab, there was a chance introduction to the new hometown community AM station, and in 1951 that led to an opportunity to host a youth-oriented show that was sandwiched among news, sports, popular music, and a little bit of classical programming.
With the exception of a few years running radio stations in Los Angeles, the whole of MacNeill’s subsequent career has been spent at WCRB, which evolved rapidly in the 1950s under the leadership of its owner, Ted Jones, from a garden-variety community station into one of the nation’s most successful all-classical commercial stations.
Part of that success was the result of programming by the likes of MacNeill, but, he notes, there was also a steady stream of technical breakthroughs. For example, “binaural broadcasting” — known today as stereo — was largely unknown in the 1950s. However, not long after Waltham-based WCRB added an FM transmitter to its original AM station, it began broadcasting several hours a week with one channel on AM and the other on FM — making it among the first stereo broadcasts in the nation.
These experiments and work by WCRB engineers contributed to the development of broadcast standards that were incorporated in modern multiplexing stereo. In fact, WCRB-FM was one of the first three stations in the world to broadcast in stereo, starting in 1961, using equipment hand-built for the station by H.H. Scott, which at the time was based in Maynard.
WCRB’s engineers tackled more challenges, regularly recording the Boston Symphony Orchestra and handling distribution of those recordings. Later in the 1960s, in partnership with WGBH-FM, which by then had acquired stereo broadcasting capability, they experimented with quadrophonic recording and broadcasting. MacNeill recalls that the day quadrophonic was announced, at a special event at Tanglewood: “I was standing next to one of the speakers and I expected to hear sound coming from that speaker but when all four speakers began to replay the BSO recording, it was indistinguishable from a live event. You couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from — it was amazing,” says MacNeill.
Although quadrophonic technology briefly entered the commercial realm, cost and lack of compatibility among systems caused its demise. Those WGBH and WCRB experiments lasted only a few years. WCRB also persuaded the FCC to alter its rules governing the modulation range of the FM signal so that it could more accurately reproduce the dynamics of music. They also succeeded in getting the FCC to waive station identification requirements so that live or lengthy performances would not have to be interrupted. “We were the first to use the FM subcarrier for other broadcasts, including our classical challenge to Muzak and a special educational channel for broadcasting to doctors,” says MacNeil.
According to MacNeill, when CDs were first developed in the 1980s, they were available first in Europe (from Phillips). So Richard Kaye, an early manager and minority stockholder in the station, flew to London and purchased as many classical recordings as he could obtain. “When we introduced them on the air for the first time, we didn’t tell people what we were doing but we got inundated with telephone calls from people wanting to know what we had done to make the sound so perfect,” he recalls.
MacNeill says subsequent to Ted Jones’ death, the station went through a series of ownership changes, some of which led to programming changes that actually boosted listenership into the top 10 for the region, a considerable accomplishment for a classical station. For example, in December 1997, just 12 years ago, WCRB checked in with a 5.5 share of the 12-plus (or general) audience, which was good enough to rank No. 5 in the Boston market. In November of this year, the station still ranked 16th in Boston.
According to Jeanne Hopkins, WGBH’s vice president for communications and government relations, WCRB on-air personality Laura Carlo and three other staff members have joined WGBH. MacNeill was not among that group.
“WCRB and WGBH had a similar size audience overall.” However, for classical audience alone, WCRB’s overall audience was about three times the size of WGBH’s classical audience,” Hopkins says. “WGBH is very excited to have been able acquire WCRB and preserve an all-classical station — something that would have been lost to Boston had we not been able to step up.”
Camilla Lockwood, a former New Hampshire district attorney who worked at the station briefly before attending law school, recalls that one of the main struggles was always getting the sales staff and advertisers to understand the station format and the audience.
“It was a struggle for them not to have singing commercials, like the other stations,” she recalls.
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