Courtesy of BigAppleAirchecks, here’s a wonderful taste of 93/KHJ during the Charlie Van Dyke era. KHJ is full of excitement and personality oozes out of the very pores of this radio station. Outside of the Drake era, it really didn’t get much better than this for KHJ.
The audio quality of this recording is nothing less than superb. Listening to this you can easily get lost in this audio time warp back to 1976. It sounds better than you’d hear on ANY AM receiver today, thanks to the wideband receivers back then.
Both Charlie Van Dyke and Mark Elliot are successful voiceover artists today, and both have been quite successful in both radio and television in major markets in the United States and Canada.
KHJ was really at the top of it’s game here. Wonderful quality for such an old aircheck too. Love it!
This is a great aircheck. One of the best you have on this site. Thank you Steve for another homerun on Airchexx.com
If the Drake era (actually the Ron Jacobs era from 1965-1969) was KHJ’s Golden era, then this was the Silver, if not “Gold II”.
Van Dyke, when he became Program Director in January 1975, took what had become just another radio station and polished it to perfection, bringing back Mark Elliott, who’d left in 1973 shortly after Drake did, and adding Bobby Ocean, Dr. John Leader, J.B. Stone, Shana and a few others. In fact, Machine Gun Kelly was the only jock to survive CVD’s housecleaning.
Two minor notes: The audio certainly benefitted from whatever reciever was plugged into the recorder, but credit has to be given to the brilliant audio processing set up by engineer Bob Kanner, brought down to KHJ by CVD after the wonders he worked at KFRC, San Francisco.
And while Charlie continues to do voiceovers for TV and radio stations all over America, Mark retired a couple of years ago.
This was the era (mid 70s)when RKO General had a whole fleet of hit stations including KFRC in San Francisco that won five straight station of the year awards. The jingle package was absolutely bar none, RKO was a broadcast monster and so was L.A.’s 93 KHJ
The Jingle Package was from TM/Dallas – They called it the “YOU” Package and it was kinda a “Rip” from the HOT “McDonald’s” Jingles running in the early ’70’s. The Wide-Band Receiver could have really only been form a Broadcast Modulation Monitor, either right there at KHJ or another facility where one was available, costing several thousand USD. – I was at either KRIZ, KTKT or KUPD-FM/AM During this period, Ron Jones put prototype “CRL” boxes on at KUPD AM/FM using 4-Band Multi-Band limiters on KUPD and we were LOUD!
KHJ sounds like it had an LA-3A optical compressor, then EQ & Echo then the DAP 310 from Mike Dorrough, a 3-Band compressor followed by about 3-6 db of Equitech FAST “FET” Peak Limiting set at 100:1 Ratio……
Any one KNOW for sure ????
DrDaveUSA@GMail.com
All correct except I think there’s another EQ after the DAP with a midrange-nulling smile.
I remember Mark Elliott as American Top 40’s frequent guest host whenever Casey Kasem was on vacation. Super aircheck!
The Kanner racks, literally more than one rack, created multiband processing before it was cool. Crossovers separated the audio, each processed, then combined together. The mic channel was processed separately from the rest of the program audio. The mic fed audition on the console while everything else was program. The mic was processed and then mixed back with the rest of the programming audio. There is a picture of the processing rack of sister station WHBQ on the net. Search “WHBQ Processing on Parade” and it should appear.