Thursday, July 16, 2009

Clarifying Something From Tuesday's Update

A comment on our Tuesday update has us wanting to clarify what we meant regarding the Boston, Massachusetts flip of what is now WBMX-FM 98.5/Boston to a sports station (WBZ-FM "98.5 The Sports Hub"), with the WBMX-FM calls and "Mix" format currently on that station switching to 104.1 (currently WBCN-FM, a rock station), and the rock format switching to a subchannel of one of the two frequencies.

Whew, that's a lot to say in one sentence! Now, to what needed clarification.

We said that WBMX was being "flipped" to sports talk. In this case that's the truth. Our reader said that the Mix format isn't going away. He has that correct - it's being switched to 104.1 FM as mentioned above.

As for the Rock format - for most non-HD Radio listeners, that IS going away after August 13. If you've got an HD radio and live in or are going through Boston, you WILL be able to pick up that rock format on an HD-2 subchannel when 104.1 flips formats to the "Mix" format.

This also drives us to clarify what we mean when we say "flip" in regards to formats. "Flipping" formats means a change from one format (e.g. Hot Adult Contemporary, Rock, Sports talk) to another format.

It may or may not mean a particular format will disappear completely from the airwaves. In this case, again - "Mix" doesn't go away, but it does get moved to another frequency (104.1), and "Sports Hub" takes its place on the 98.5 frequency. The rock format doesn't completely disappear, but it does go to an HD subchannel.

Here's a bit of new information: There's currently some confusion as to which frequency's subchannels will play host to the current "Rock of Boston". But yesterday, that was supposed to be on 104.1 HD-2. Tonight we're reading it could be 98.5 HD-2. We definitely know tonight that it'll be on the internet - but that's all we know.

So there's some clarifications to the situation up there.

If anybody wants to tell us what the plans are in Washington, feel free to do so.

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