‘Sounds’ tells tale of FM revolution

By Patrick Parsons

It was 1968, my junior year of high school. I sat in my friend Alan’s bedroom and listened, wide-eyed, to his new FM receiver.

It was an “underground” station out of San Francisco, KMPX, with clarity of sound I’d never experienced on radio, and featuring groups — Canned Heat and Country Joe and the Fish — never played on AM “Top 40.” Most amazing of all, it was in stereo. For myself and a new generation, there was no going back to the static hiss of the AM transistor.

While it was a new medium for me, and in many ways for the country, FM radio had, at that time, been around for more than three decades. Its path, to counterculture embrace and eventual market acceptance, however, had been a twisted and arduous one.

The history of FM broadcasting, it turns out, is a historical drama, complete with seemingly insurmountable technical barriers, bitter personal rivalries, political battles fueled by vested economic interests, and eventual dominance by a once-suppressed and al-most- dead technology. The tale is brilliantly told in “Sounds of Change.”

Both Sterling and Keith are long-standing leaders in the study of broadcast history, and they bring a scholar’s attention to detail and citation. There are three appendices with technical and statistical material, 41 pages of reference notes and a lengthy bibliography. They are equally as skilled in turning the facts into engaging narrative, and there is no lack of drama, and even suspense, in “Sounds of Change.”

The story begins with the efforts of one of broadcasting’s early geniuses, Edwin Armstrong. Dissatisfied, as were others, with the static and distortion of amplitude modulation (AM), Armstrong spent more than six years developing a system to vary the frequency rather than the amplitude (size) of the radio wave.

The results of Armstrong’s frequency modulation (FM) were astounding. The crackle and hiss of the AM signal were replaced by an eerie background of silence, against which every spoken word and musical note stood out clearly. He showed the invention to his friend, RCA head David Sarnoff, in 1933, but the new device threatened the multimillion dollar AM industry upon which RCA’s success depended, and Sarnoff was more interested in developing television.

Armstrong moved ahead on his own, spending much of his personal fortune to stimulate an embryonic FM system in the 1930s. He fought through regulatory setbacks in the 1940s that made obsolete millions of dollars in transmitters and receivers. He entered into legal battles with RCA, and his friendship with Sarnoff soured. In 1954, out of money and losing in court, Armstrong took his own life.

Sterling and Keith recount, through nine chapters, the following “dismal years” of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when television took center stage and interest in FM faded to near nonexistence. In the early 1960s, market saturation of television, a lack of available AM licenses, the approval of stereo broadcasting, and FM’s low entry costs provided a foundation for resurgence.

Offering dramatically improved signal quality, stereo sound, and alternative programming, FM began making commercial progress. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, FM had displaced AM as the dominant form of radio in the United State. In the meantime, it also had served as the incubator, and then primary vehicle, for educational and noncommercial radio.

“Sounds of Change” leads us through the story, touching on technology, politics, popular culture, and, always, the economics of broadcasting. It is a story of ambition, depression, hope, and success told with skill by two of broadcasting’s best scholars.

Patrick Parsons is the Don Davis professor in ethics in the College of Communications at Penn State.