KAHM 102.1 Prescott, AZ Airchecks 2011 Feb 27 & 2011 Oct 31 UNSCOPED from Internet audio stream

"Music as beautiful as Prescott".

Here are two unscoped captures from the live stream simulcast of the famous easy listening station KAHM 102.1 in Prescott, AZ (http://kahm.info/), captured in 2011. The first capture is from 2011 February 27 and is 3 1/2 hours long. A timed playlist is included as a separate text file (use the "TEXT" download option at right to view it). The second is from Hallowe'en of that year and is around 20 minutes in length. The stream was captured using WGET in Mandrake 2008.1 to spool the MP3 audio feed from their Shoutcast server to a file on my local disk.

In 2011, KAHM were encoding at a low sample rate and bitrate (16 kHz 32Kb CBR stereo-intensity MPEG 2.0 layer 3) thus it was of comparitavely low fidelity. About a year or so before public simulcasting ended, they increased it to 22020/64, improving the audio quality considerably. (I know I captured audio during this period, and remember doing it, but I have no idea where the disks are. Once I find them I will post those captures here.) According to the Shoutcast status page they were encoding at 44100/96 MP3, as of this writeup in November 2019.

Simulcasting via stream, which began in 2005, was ultimately cancelled on 2015 September 14 because of a sudden extreme increase of traffic caused by Sirius/XM (US commercial satellite DAB [SDARS] monopoly clusterf-k) having cancelled their beautiful music service earlier in the year. Its former listeners/refugees started flocking to the KAHM stream, causing KAHM no end of problems (albeit unintentionally) by overloading their Shoutcast server and exceeding their bandwidth limit. They reinstated the simulcast in 2016 on an external streaming host, putting it behind an high-cost paywall and limiting access to 30 simultaneous users (http://www.ophanim.net:8020/). As of the date of this posting the playlist is still openly viewable under the Shoutcast page's "History" header.

This audio is as it came off the Internet in 2011 and has not been modified or transcoded. The only edit I made was to trim the song fragments off the beginning and ending of the blocks using MP3SPLT, otherwise the programme is untouched.