Stereophonic football: Radio station satisfies fans of two teams by broadcasting one game in each speaker

Stereophonic football: Radio station satisfies fans of two teams by broadcasting one game in each speaker. Check it out:
(Beaumont Enterprise, The (Texas) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Sep. 29--LIBERTY -- So you can't make the trip to Dayton tonight, when your undefeated Lumberton Raiders take on the Broncos in their District 22-4A opener.

The next best thing is to turn on your car stereo and move the dial to 99.9 FM, which broadcasts Dayton games. You're listening for Larry Wadzeck, who handles play-by-play duties for the Broncos. But there's this other voice. This guy is talking right over Wadzeck. He won't go away, and he's driving you bonkers. Is it a bad signal? Bad production? What in the name of Brad Sham is going on here?



Ease up. You are not losing your mind. The voices are not in your head; there are, indeed, two sets of voices yakking away at the same time, on the same channel. In the right speaker is Wadzeck, who's at the Dayton game. In the left speaker is Bill Buchanan -- play-by-play announcer for Liberty games, president/general manager of KSHN, and the imaginative (perhaps deranged) man who decided to broadcast two football games at once.

This is "Shine All Nine," the small-market station that has become an institution in Liberty and Dayton -- and perhaps the most convincing proof that high school football is king in Texas.

"You've got two local teams and one local station?" asks Buchanan, a chatty, charming fellow who bought the station in 1977. "You want to treat both of'em fairly, so you put both of 'em on. We call it 'Split-Channel Sports.' ... I guess it's proof I'm crazy."

When Buchanan bought the station all those years ago, it was a 250-watt AM station called KPXE -- and unless you lived across the street from the tower, your chances of hearing KPXE were about 50-50. If you tuned in at night, your chances were even less. As in zero. The FCC made the station power down at sunset.

With those obstacles, Buchanan had no way of broadcasting high school football games live. His only option was to put them on the air the following Saturday afternoon, on a tape-delay basis.

Some years later, the FCC changed the standards by which frequencies were turned, opening opportunities for smaller stations. On Aug. 29, 1991, KPXE-AM became KSHN-FM, 99.9 on your radio dial. "Shine All Nine" was born.

Buchanan's staff chose the call letters because he wanted the station to sound bright and cheery, like an old friend down the street. Basically, being a small-market station, that's what it had to be.

Buchanan didn't want KSHN to be categorized, either. Its format still is in that gray area, somewhere between adult contemporary, oldies and classic rock (without the rough edges).

First and foremost, Buchanan wanted his station to be known as local through and through. It's why local and statewide news updates are on the air every hour, and it's why KPXE began broadcasting high school football in the first place.

Once KSHN could go live at night, one of its problems was solved: It could air one high school game live, as it happened. So for most of the '91 season, Buchanan tried his best to split the difference between Liberty and Dayton, the two hometown schools. One week, he'd broadcast a Liberty game live, followed by a tape-delayed account of the Dayton game. The next week, it was vice versa.

But Buchanan wasn't quite satisfied. He couldn't turn his brain off.

"I kept saying to myself, 'There's got to be a better way to do this,'" he recalls.

Buchanan knew he had good equipment at the station, so he started brainstorming the best way to use it. He asked one engineer, and another and another: Could we split these signals into two broadcasts?

In theory, they told him, you could.

Think about it this way: When a tower distributes a song to your radio, the song arrives as two different signals -- half of it on the left, the other half on the right.

The trick, then, was for KSHN to split those signals into two different broadcasts.

"So we cut the wire," Buchanan said. "We used alligator clips and re-routed the wire to the production room. We asked our audience to listen one night -- we were going to play a game and test something out. 'Would you guys listen in to both speakers, then the left one, then the right one? Then would you tell us how it sounds?'"

A dozen or so listeners called in, giving mixed results. Sometimes, each signal was as clear as a bell. Sometimes, one signal would "bleed" onto the other signal, producing two voices in one speaker.

Still, Buchanan was encouraged enough to try it out.

"When he told me what he was doing, I said OK," recalled Wadzeck, a longtime teacher at Dayton who currently serves as interim superintendent for Devers Independent School District.

"I told Bill, 'Well, you're the technician. You know what you're doing, I guess.' "

Buchanan didn't, really. But at the end of the '91 season, "Split-Channel Sports" was born.

The station explained its concept almost around the clock. Announcers told their audiences to turn the balance-control dial all the way left for Liberty, all the way to the right for Dayton, or keep it in the middle if you were really deranged and wanted to keep track of both games at once.

"The weird part was that at first, I'd get a lot of feed from Bill's broadcast," Wadzeck recalled. "I'd hear him calling the other game, (and) I'm trying to concentrate on mine ... that was surprising, to say the least."

The experiment stuck. It went full-time in 1992, and KSHN has broadcast two games at once, every Friday night, for nearly 15 years now.

Results have improved, too. The alligator clips have been replaced by a switch, and the in-house producer lets listeners know when Split-Channel Sports is about to begin. And while the broadcasts don't bleed over as much as they used to, producers still keep their ears open. They adjust the balance whenever Buchanan gets excited over a big play, so as not to disrupt the sanctity of Wadzeck's play-by-play, and vice versa.

"We still explain it quite a bit," Buchanan said, "but not nearly as much as we did those first two years."

The FCC does not keep track of how many stations produce split-speaker broadcasts, but Buchanan said he's received more than 100 phone calls from curious station managers over the years.

His message to them: If you're a perfectionist, hang up the phone and don't bother with the experiment. If you can deal with imperfection for 10 Friday nights, go for it.

KSHN now broadcasts online as well, which creates a whole new set of instructions.

In fact, with new technology and opportunities on the Web, Buchanan thought about doing away with the split-channel format a few years ago. He asked his KSHN audience for their thoughts.

Is this really still worthwhile? Or are we even crazier than we were before?

"We got 164 responses," Buchanan said. "Four people said we should go back to normal radio. Four out of 164. I don't know about you, but I call that a mandate."

No matter which speaker it's coming from.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Beaumont Enterprise, Texas
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