Radio: June 26, 2020     Last week I wrote a little about streaming audio and how, with the use of smart speakers, smart phones, and plain old computer streaming, the possibility of internet radio essentially replacing traditional broadcast radio.     This week I want to travel to both the past and one of broadcast radio’s possible futures, spurred on by the ideas presented last week, my absolutely illogical love of AM radio, and a letter to the editor of industry newspaper Radio World that I read online at radioworld.com.     AM radio broadcasting is almost a century old in the United States - numerous stations in Los Angeles, including KHJ (930 AM), KFI (640 AM) and KNX (1070 AM) will celebrate 100 years of broadcasting in two years. That’s an impressive feat, especially considering the technology is essentially the same as it was in 1922.     As I mentioned last week, digital HD Radio, considered for a time as the savior of both AM — due to higher fidelity — and FM — due to potential higher fidelity and extra stations — just hasn’t made the impact many had hoped. For various reasons, many AM stations have turned off the HD signal, even while FMs continue to use it, and consumers don’t seem all that interested in either. But as I said last week, with smart speakers, what’s the point? And a related question comes up: is broadcast AM radio just a dead technology?     Christopher Boone thinks he has the answers. No, AM is not dead. But if you really want to improve it, bring back a technology that already “failed” … AM stereo. In a letter sub-headlined “Want revitalization? Mandate AM stereo in any FM stereo radio,” Boone makes the point that analog AM stereo is still an option for broadcasters, and that it would be an easy technology to re-implement.     “One-hundred stations in the United States still broadcast in C-QUAM AM stereo, and there are more returning. A station in the New Orleans market will be starting C-QUAM as I write. There is one in Texas and more thinking about it. Australia has announced four stations there will be begin C-QUAM stereo transmissions in the next month or two.”     AM stereo was a technology tried in the 1980s, but it didn’t pan put for two primary reasons: The FCC didn’t set a single standard until years after interest waned, confusing both manufacturers and consumers having to deal with four incompatible standards. And stereo means nothing if the audio still sounds muddy, as many AM stereo receivers did.     But AM stereo has the potential to sound absolutely amazing. I own a Carver tuner that was made with an AM tuner capable of reproducing AM audio quality all the way to 20 kHz … higher than most humans can hear, higher than the standard for FM stereo, and much greater than the 3 kHz that the typical AM radio can produce.     The problem is that there are no currently-available radios that can decode AM stereo, right? Wrong. HD Radio is similar enough to the AM stereo standard C-QUAM that a station can’t broadcast AM HD and traditional stereo at the same time … which also means that many HD radios in use can already decode it. “The HD Radios (that can decode analog stereo) only need some code written to decode it and open up the bandwidth for full analog fidelity,” Boone says, adding that modern receiver designs can reduce or eliminate static and other noise inherent to AM broadcasting, making for an impressive listening experience.     The solution for AM improvement, according to Boone: Mandate stereo on AM for any radio that receives stereo on FM, and include receiver standards that make the audio sound better. My additional suggestion: program something worth hearing.     Want to hear some samples of AM stereo? www.i1430.com sends their online live stream through a Carver AM stereo tuner, and a member of a Facebook group dedi