Aired July 14, 2015	The credits roll.  Right in the middle!

 

Updated December 15, 2019 -- All WCBS-FM Update

 

The wants:

If you have any vintage WABC, WNBC, WLS, anything from Cleveland from before 1980 (particularly WWWM, otherwise known as "M-105,"), anything from Rochester, New York before 1980, and anything of WGR, Buffalo before 1980 (especially Stan Roberts), I want to hear from you right now! I list my aircheck collection on this site for the benefit of those who might have something to trade with me and would like something in return.

If you're interested in a possible trade, send me e-mail at info@radiowasbetter.com. If you wish to inquire about the cost to acquire a particular set of airchecks, please do so, and I'd be glad to quote a price for you. I charge only for my direct expenses: CD, packaging, postage, etc.,—I do not claim to own the copyright on any of this material. DecalcoMania, "the club for fans of radio," is the perfect place to meet other collectors, and information about joining is on the links page.

 

Please note that I am now sending out only digital media (audio CDs or mp3 CDs and DVDs, or internet delivery) in trade or for purchase. I'm still glad to accept material in cassette format (and pretty much any other format as well), but given the low cost and ubiquity of CDs now and the fact that I now use several large hard drives for archival storage of material, all of my collection is in mp3 format, and it is just easier, faster, and cheaper to make digital copies than to make cassettes. I also trade extensively via the internet using file sending services like adrive.com, sendspace, myairbridge, and about a dozen others.

In addition to cassettes, other older media formats I can work with are LPs and reel-to-reel tape.  If you have tapes or cassettes and would like what's on them transferred to CD, mp3, etc., I'd be glad to work with you. I've heard from people with reels of airchecks they've had since the 1960s but now have no way of playing them. I've borrowed these, done the transfer, and returned both the reels and new, CD versions, to the owners. I've done the same with LPs. Please contact me if you're in such a situation.

 

Some definitions, because I get asked this often.  On the far right side of most of the lists of airchecks on the pages that follow is a column labeled "Scoping."  "Scoped" (which is short for "telescoped") is aircheck/radio lingo for a recording of a radio station in which some aspect of the broadcast has been edited out.  A fully scoped aircheck might have everything edited out (commercials, songs, newscasts) except for the DJ patter.  It wasn't uncommon back in the day (and probably still true today) for disk jockeys to create audio resumes of their work to send to radio stations when seeking employment, and the best thing they could send would be a recording of their actual work.  The program director at the new station didn't need to hear the full songs, commericals, etc, but rather only how the DJ sounded, and hence the editing.  Many of those recordings survive to this day.

Some airchecks are "partly" scoped.  Often this means that only the newscasts or only the commercials have been edited out.  "None" thus means what you think it would mean, and that is that nothing has been edited out, and listening to the aircheck is indistinguishable from listening to the actual radio broadcast at the time.  I greatly prefer unscoped airchecks, and you'll see that that's what I have the most of.  I generally don't trade for scoped airchecks unless it's an unusual or rare recording or DJ or something like that. 

As a general rule of my own, if an aircheck has only the newscasts edited out, I still call that an unscoped aircheck.  Otherwise, I'll list what's actually missing (commercials only or songs only) for a partly scoped aircheck.

 

One other comment about how things are organized of the pages that follow.  Whenever new airchecks are added to any page, those airchecks are shown in bold type.  That way you can find quickly what's been added since the last time that page was updated.  Keep in mind that the date of the last update of any page is not necessarily the date shown at the top of this page as not all pages are updated every time the site itself is updated.  Rather, the airchecks in bold are those added as of the update date shown next to that page's link in the lists below.  This system does not apply to the lists of countdown shows as I don't keep separate dates for the updating of each year of shows.  The listing at the top of this page indicates the years of which countdown shows were updated as part of the current update.

 

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Listed below are the states, in alphabetical order, for which I have at least one aircheck. The date following the state name is the last time that page was updated with new airchecks. Within each state or category listing, the most recently added airchecks are shown in bold.

 

United States