COLUMBIA
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"The Major," FM and Good Listening

ELLIOTT i\[. SANGER
 

F
 

^ ORTY years ago it was generally agreed that the average
American was not as interested in "good music" as was his
European counterpart. Today a large share of our popula¬
tion has acquired a liking for classical music probably not ex¬
ceeded anywhere. There are probably many factors contributing
to this change of attitude toward good music, among them the im¬
proved economic status of the public which has enabled people to
indulge their tastes; the increase in travel between this country and
Europe which has exposed more people to different cultural ac¬
tivities; the influx of great performers from other areas of the
world; and the increased attention to music in our colleges and
universities. The greatest influence is the availability of good music
and ways of reproducing it faithfully by means of improved radio
transmission of high-fidelity sound which is attributable to Fre¬
quency Modulation or FM.

AMien my partner John V. L. Hogan and I founded \^'QXR in
1936, he was a pioneer radio engineer who was already experi¬
menting with "high fidelity" AM broadcasting. He had obtained
permission from the Federal Communications Commission to use
a double channel in the AM spectrum in order to transmit the full
range of sound frequencies audible to the human ear, which is ap¬
proximately 400 to 16,000 cycles per second. Due to the fact that
the home radio receivers of those days were not good enough to