Well if you know her so well, perhaps then you’d like to enlighten us?
Having been “weekend warriors” with Megs doing Hit and me on MMM for quite a few years, I don’t think she’d mind me saying that she’s always flown under the radar (often to her detriment) but there’s nothing to see here in regards to not having her photo on the website.
I just raised the comment as I find it odd for a network like NOVA to not feature a personality online, who has now been with the network for several years. IMO, a photo on the website (along with regular social posts like what Gordie & MC do each day) is what helps to connect the more loyal listeners to the voice behind the mic.
A big coup for Coast FM 96.3.
19/9 UPDATE: According to an article on page 2, as well as an ad on the front page, of this week’s print edition of Coast Community News, she will be presenting Saturday mornings from 10am to Midday, starting from 28th September.
Star 104.5 is apparently now the “Central Coast’s favourite hit music station”, according to their website.
The music format does seem more similar to Hit or Nova than to the AC station that they were a few years ago.
I’d say that’s a digital team error. Same was said on the new NovaFM websites until recently.
Maybe NOVA’s digital team don’t listen to their own stations that much.
Radio 50+ has now rebranded as Easy FM:
https://easyfm.com.au/
RDS has been updated also.
Article about the Easy FM rebranding:
I was listening to some Easy FM today while driving around. I’m quite impressed.
Quite a good music mix - heard some easy listening staples like Cat Stevens, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and Dionne Warwick, plus softer songs from ‘rockier’ artists like the Alan Parsons Project (“Eye In The Sky”) and Crowded House (“Fall At Your Feet”). Not too many ads, decent AIR news bulletins, and professional sweepers complete the picture.
I was never a regular listener to Radio Five-O Plus. Mostly that’s because I thought the music and presentation left a lot to be desired, but also I’m in my 20s and certainly not 50 plus! However this new station seems like a decent alternative to CoastFM 96.3 and I’ll certainly be returning to it.
I agree with this.
The music is much easier to listen to than on Coast.
I tend to only last a maximum of 13 minutes on Coast before I have to change stations either due to a WTF song, or when my ears can’t handle the excessive audio processing.
Speaking with one of their volunteers, as I understand there are quite a few more reveals to come from Easy in the near future.
You must be only one of very few who only listen to CoastFm that long, most listeners stay a lot longer than that & there’s plenty of places around the Coast have it on all day at workplaces.
How often during the Classic Hits hours do you hear a WTF song, I wouldn’t imagine very often, the program director has cleaned out the music library of songs that past presenters had put in it that shouldn’t have been there because they don’t fit the format.
What do you find so excessive about the audio processing, it’s no louder than WSFM, & there’s very little compression in it, it’s mostly just a bit of bass enhancement similar to the old Optimod’s of the 80’s when a lot of the Classic Hits played were played on radio as new releases. Listening in the studio, switching between source & off air, there’s not a huge difference in sound.
You’re actually the only person who’s said anything negative about the processing, I’ve had very positive reviews from quite a few others, including others in the industry outside the Central Coast who have been passing through or on holidays there.
The ex Coast FM station/sales manager has moved to EasyFm as sales manager there & seems to be stamping his authority, possibly over stepping it, and I have no doubt is fully behind the reason of change there, taking 50 plus to what CoastFM used to be with the easy mix, before it changed to Classic Hits.
Agree, i think Coast FM is one of the best sounding stations processing wise.
Maybe I’m hearing the WTF’s in Coast’s “off peak” hours. My listening patterns are all over the shop with my work.
Talking about the sound though. I admit some songs do sound OK, even good from time to time. But that is mainly anything from the 60’s and even 70’s. Those recordings are littered with imperfections and phase issues but in my experience, they are the easiest genres of music to dial in to sound good in a short amount of time.
My main gripe is the ugly distortion in the upper mids and highs on most post-1980 records. Sometimes it’s actually unbearable and is an instant station changer for me. Don’t get me wrong, some distortion is good, but it can get real ugly real quick. One in particular I can remember was “Everytime You Cry” by John Farnham. It absolutely ruined what is a well mixed and mastered song.
The AGC and Multiband release times are way too slow for my taste too.
But the first rule of audio processing is that it’s so subjective. What I like, you may not. Whet you like I may not. That’s what makes stations unique.
This sounds like my experience with the Coast’s many commercial stations
I think the processing is good, the music mix is great - and most importantly, there’s none of those nasty low bitrate MP3s that you often hear on community radio (even in 2024).
In general, I’ve often noticed that the older, dynamically mastered songs tend to come out of radio processing sounding quite good. The problems seem to start when modern brickwalled productions which look like a giant block in an audio editor, and are filled with clipping, are played on air.
Those are settings from the head audio processing engineer at Wheatstone &/or engineer at Agile Broadcast for a Classic Hits format, after we asked them to help get the sound we wanted. The only settings I’ve changed are pretty much the AGC/Multiband crossover frequencies to be as close as possible match old Optimod & the levels of the final limiters which I’ve pulled down mostly in the high mids, so the sound isn’t piercingly painful as I have sensitive ears at those frequencies, hate to say it similar to female hearing.
As for distortion if there still is any, I’m finding impossible to remove, most of it is caused by presenters having the levels in the studio too loud. The studio is fully AoIP digital & if they run the levels too high, it simply runs out of digital headroom & distortion is created from hitting the clippers or hitting the multiband clippers too hard on the peaks. I have seen some processor input RMS levels of -5 dBfs when they should be down between-18 to -12 dBfs to be distortion free.
My pet hate is presenters who can’t ride faders properly.
I’ve been listening to 93.3 Easy on the Community Radio App while driving elderly clients around the Hunter the last few weeks - the station gets really good feedback from the oldies.
@RFBurns , Last night (this morning) I had my monthly 8 hour overnight shift, and usually I will have Coast on in the background as all other stations have too much talk overnight. But from midnight right through to 6am I heard nothing but backup tape on Coast?
But I also had it on last Wednesday and heard a few observations you might want to know about? I know in the past you’ve said to let you know if anything sounds out of place.
Wednesday 12:55pm (approx) Boz Scaggs - What Can I Say?
Borderline unlistenable distortion in the hooks of the song. The synths and horns were the real losers here, and in general it just had the life sucked out of what is a very nice and spectrally spaced out mix. I have heard this song on countless stations and most of the time it sounds very good.
The other one I heard was Mike Oldfield - Moonlight Shadow which suffered a similar fate.
To me , the main culprit sounds like the clippers are being driven too heavy. You’ve said recently that they are set to modest levels. While all brands are different, I have done extensive work with the main “O” brands and can tell you that setting the clipper drive to 0 doesn’t necessarily mean 0db of drive to the clippers. Those controls are arbitrary and there could be for example 1 or 1.5db of drive being applied regardless of what that control states visually.
It’s not uncommon to see an Optimod with negative clipper drive. Perhaps give that a try?
It also didn’t sound like there was any processing on the backup audio either? It was very soft compared to all the others.
Thanks, I’ll have to look at that, backup shouldn’t have been on all night, midnight to dawn last night & no one from the station has mentioned anything to me about it either?
No there is no processing on the backup, the processor is at the studio, we don’t have any processing or RDS on the backup so we know it’s actually on backup, TX backup is mono only as well so again we easily know.
Edit, I’ve just checked with the studio IT tech & Zetta crashed at 1am, he fixed just before 6am, he should’ve known earlier than that but seems he didn’t & he’s in Canberra until tonight.
I don’t have much to do with the IT (software) or Zetta play-out, so that’s why I wasn’t told, if there was a studio hardware fail or transmitter fail, I would’ve been told/known about it very early in the outage.
Discussion about the local radio ratings results can be found here:
Hi Tide, previously on 2KY & most recently on 2SM, will be joining The Fishing Fellas on Coast FM, starting from Saturday 11th January. The program will be titled The Fishing Fellas at Hit Tide.