As you may or may not know after my Wife had survived cancer and had a few other severe medical issues I lost all my nice electronics equipment. Back in the day I could have bought a FIM 71 field strength meter for FM and one of the field strength meters for AM. Plus I'd have one of the best AM Transmitters with built in processing. That said its now just a laptop, NextKast as my Radio automation software with built in audio processing that was built for FM transmitters and Internet Radio. Having an internet station I can't screw with the processing to make AM sound good as it would kill my Internet stream. Remembering how I still wanted surround sound when watching movies I was able to get a JVC headphone surround sound adapter FREE from free cycle here in Elizabeth City, NC. I loved it for listening to movies in Dolby Pro Logic II surround sound. The side effect of the adapter was it added some low end. Well I thought since the Talking House 5.0 has a horrible sound as compared to FM how can I force a better more pleasant sound on a poor man's budget. Then it hit me. AM being mono does not care if your pumping mono into it or Stereo and as to how wide it is. What happens if I connect the JVC surround sound headphone adapter between my external sound card adapter and the AM transmitter. So I found some double AA batteries and plugged the built in cord to audio out of the card. Then I plugged the 1/8 in patch cord into the phones jack of the surround sound adapter and the other end into the Talking house 5.0. Fired it up and It helped. That shrill AM crap sound was now more sweeter sounding. There is a slight echo as the Dolby Pro logic virtual surround sound is creating just a slight echo. It reminds me of WABC AM years ago. WLS also had a slight sound like this. Only bad thing is that this adapter is battery operated. I'll have to invest in a battery charger and some NiMH batteries and charge them every night to allow me to run everyday from noon to 4 AM. I may try a graphic equalizer if I can get one cheap along with a stereo 1/8 jack to RCA jacks. Maybe a 5-10 band EQ eill do. AM doesn't really have any frequencies above 2K. Adjusting the lower end could help. Or maybe an electric version of the JVC surround sound headphone adapter could be a cheap way to make AM listenable to an Album Rocker. Some songs seem to need just a bit of tweaking, but at least now I can stand to listen to my own station as AM really did suck before for a poor man's Radio station.
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