Airchexx.com

Here’s Y-100′s morning show featuring Sonny Fox, from the middle of the ‘decade of greed’, 1985! HitOldies jock Al Roberts recorded this noise free mono ‘check way back when. Compare with THIS aircheck we posted from 1984…

Special thanks, as always, to our HitOldies friend Daniel Coulombe for this exceptional aircheck.

This was sent in by Daniel Coulombe… an original recording of Don Cox on I95 in South Florida. This is vintage 80s. Entertainment news, featuring who else? Michael Jackson. Not to mention, Cox IS counting down the top 10 songs of the week. Heard at the end of this aircheck is Johnny Dolan, apparently coming in to do his shift.

Whatever happened to this kind of personality top forty?? Never mind, we know the answer (that’s why I’m not in the biz anymore…)

Heres’s a very young Jackson Armstrong (with a slightly higher pitched voice) on WFUN, one of the early AM Top 40 stations in Miami. This has all the elements that many personality oriented stations had, reverb, PAMS jingles, and a lot of jock patter. Certainly not the streamlined Drake approach, more like a WABC approach, circa 1964.

It’s only slightly over 3 minutes in length but you can certainly get a feel for what things sounded like in the tumultuous year of 1968.

From the enormous Robyn Watts collection, we present J.J Walker on Y-100! This is included on a tape put out by a then-popular aircheck service called East Coast Airchecks. This is from tape #11.

A pretty funny and exciting late-80s CHR, Y-100 had a great lineup in those days. Walker does a feature called “Bed Check”, where callers throw in their comments and Walker just has a good time with it. Not much in the way of formatics or music, what scoped things we’d allow anyway. But one gets a feel for the J.J. Walker show presented here in a restored recording, lightly processed and noise reduced as the source tape was a bit worn.

Thanks to site friend Daniel Coulombe, here’s a GREAT, original recording he made of Sonny Fox and the morning show on Miami’s legendary Y100!. You’ll love this scoped look at a hugely entertaining and funny jock with all the elements that made morning radio fun.

Unlike most of today’s morning shows which are laden with Hollywood fluff… this is so good, and Sonny Fox is just himself. Its refreshing to hear how morning shows were in the mid-80s. We miss it, and you probably do too!

From the 96X Tribute page, this quote:

On October 1, 1975, 96X (WMJX) in Miami was born out of WMYQ an AOR station that faced stiff competition from two other AOR stations in the market. 96X entered as a top 40 station that played some soon to be classic rock along with the top 40 hits. Top 40 in those days was much different than today, and 96X thrived becoming a model for large market top 40 stations. The on-air personalities were colorful and a good part of the reason why the station was so successful. They obviously were having fun, and you did too if you listened.

Due to FCC legal troubles, billing irregularities, we think, 96X was forced off the air. Subsequent to the station’s demise, the former WBZ-FM 106.7 in Boston was sold and the new owners picked up the WMJX call letters in 1981 – where they reside along with it’s Adult Contemporary format today.

Tom Kent is really hot on this particular aircheck. Tom’s one of our favorites, and for good reason… with a resume that includes G98 Cleveland, WAVA Arlington and WLS Chicago, not to mention syndication, TK has enough talent to fill an encyclopedia. You’ll really enjoy this fast-paced historic broadcast of Miami’s own 96X!

Courtesy of our friends at the Aircheck Traders board on our sister site, RadioInsight.com, comes our first look at legendary South Florida Oldies station WAXY 106.

While this is more of a straight-ahead Oldies format instead of personality oriented show, there is one important technical observation I’d like to make, that I never hear anyone mention. Back in the mid-90s, as stations began converting from traditional media to hard drive based systems, there was a period of time where some stations had made a large investment in CD cart machines, and other digital, non-computer hardware. These stations, in my opinion, had an audio crispness on the air that has never been able to be duplicated. Engineers have tried, with more processing, but stations just can not compare CD audio that’s close to the original masters in sound quality with 64k encoded compressed files. Listen to WAXY here, and notice how incredible the Oldies sound, even reproduced from the original tape recording.

Fresh “master” copy sent in courtesy of our friends at California Aircheck!

It’s Your Leeeeeeeeeeeeeeder on Y-100! There’s only two guys I’ve ever heard who talk this fast – Terry ‘Motormouth’ Young on XM’s 60s on 6 channel and Jackson Armstrong. Jack was the original!

We’ve had email requests asking where Armstrong is and if the Gorilla is still with him. The answer is he was heard nightly on KB radio 1520 in Buffalo before Entercom changed formats there, but since then I believe he’s working somewhere in North Carolina. I’m not sure if the Gorilla’s still part of the show – but it’s been over a year since we exchanged emails. Maybe it’s time to ask (LOL)…

This is a great scope of Armstrong on Y-100. He’s just as energetic as ever and man! Does Y-100 sound great here.

This, apparently, is an edited demo tape probably done by HD himself. How these things get into the pipeline of airchecks floating around is anyone’s guess, but this surely was good enough to get any gig he wanted!!!

This begins and ends with a Y100 jingle. In between is some really great material. Very tight 80s CHR from one of the best stations of the era. At under 5 minutes, it’s short, thus an official airchexx.com QUICKCHECK, and certainly will leave you wanting more!

“Y-100 – Where You Count – With scores of 100 dollar bills!”

This one comes to us courtesy of Matt over at Big Apple Airchecks – and we’re just now getting around to posting it!

Here’s a slice of Miami Heat in the form of Robert W. Walker – smokin’ up the turntables at the big Y! Y-100 is running a number of promotions simultaneously, and listen to the MUSIC! Top 40, as illustrated here, was not all current hits, back in the day it was the currents, plus the great oldies pulled from a variety (not diversity) of available genres… Rock, Pop, Soul and Country.

This runs 16:43 scoped.

Once again, from a small 3″ reel, comes this hi-fi scope of WMYQ. This reel upon first glance was in terrible shape. The reel was cracked and the tape old and brittle, not even in it’s own box. Still, after playing it on a well-maintained Otari deck (Thank you WMC-FM), the audio came out crisp and quite stunning!

This sounds very much like it was recorded directly off the board. Phil Baker could have been the all-night jock, but I doubt this was recorded overnight since the newsman that you’ll hear on this scope coming out of the top and bottom of the hour reports is none other than the legendary Terrance McKeever! Hearing McKeever’s voice on a couple of news outros is worth the 10 minutes of scoped liners read by Phil Baker!

Comments: One of the purposes of Airchexx.com is to show what radio was really like back in the days before music moved to FM, and corporate consolidation ruined what we perceive as ‘good radio’. Unfortunately, IMHO, the ‘RKO’ sound featuring short liners into songs, while great when done by jocks with real personality like Robert W. Morgan, sounded TERRIBLE with a jock who did nothing WITH the liners except to read them. True, all was not perfect in radio, even in the 70s. Still, this is Miami’s version of the “Q” format (in most markets, this was the ‘post Drake’ era), and the format, for all intents and purposes sounded great on the air.

Visitors, if you remember this station, why not write a history about it by clicking the ‘Comment’ button at the bottom of this post.

Introduction by Matt Seinberg of BigAppleAirchecks.

This is part two of Miami Heat. Part one was a market composite from 1978, and is available here on airchexx.com.

Click HERE to Listen!

Returning to the archives, Matt Seinberg of Big Apple Airchecks donated this one, along with a newer version from the 80s. There are lots of vintage stations showcased here so check it out and enjoy.

Click HERE to Listen!