AM740, A Canadian Flame Thrower

The local “standards” radio station decided to go down a generation and pick up some younger listeners, so they added music outside what was their trademark for many years. I listen occasionally in the car, but it’s not my favorite anymore.

What I discovered was CHWO in Toronto, what we radio people call a “flame thrower”: a 50,000-watt fulltimer. During the day it’s hard to pick up here in Northeast PA, but at night it comes in quite well to the northeastern quadrant of the U.S. And then some.

Generally, I listen to it via the cheesy speaker in my computer (am740.ca) but today I decided I’d actually get around to connecting it to my receiver amp. I have a collection of audio cables and, fortunately, with the right ends and such to make it work. Now, instead of lousy audio, it comes out of my receiver’s speakers sounding the same as any other station.

Fortunately, I’m on a dedicated connection, so I’m online 24/7 and have the advantage of keeping AM740 going all the time while I do other things online or around my apartment. But even if I weren’t, at least I could have the station going in the background while I worked online. Supposedly, if you had a set of earphones, you could do this in your office as it does not interfere with the rest of the computer.

My readers might know how to do this. But they may be surprised to know that there is a standards station that streams over the Internet. The kind of stuff I used to play when I was a disc jockey, which could be the subject of another blog entry.