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Local
& State Headlines
ALBANY — Santa’s going to be delivering a lot of HDTVs this Christmas season. The latest-technology TVs are jumping off shelves because prices continue to decline, Sears General Manager Brian Flinn said Saturday. “The demand is greater because the price has dropped,” Flinn said. “Literally weekly, we’re getting notices from the manufacturers that the prices are dropping.” High-Definition TVs do not use the traditional cathode ray tube to broadcast its image on the screen, making it a thinner and lighter appliance, easily mounted on walls, Flinn said. They also incorporate a higher resolution — anywhere from 720-1,080 — which makes the picture quality clearer and makes colors brighter, Circuit City Sales Associate Carlton Russell said. The new generation of TVs have either plasma or LCD projection screens. Plasma screens have a slightly darker image, while LCDs, or Liquid Crystal Displays, reduce glare resulting from various light sources, Russell said. “There are two types (of HDTVs),” Russell said. “Plasma TVs tend to be a lot darker ... LCD TVs have the liquid crystal screen, which makes it better for people with a lot of windows.” When first introduced to the general public in the late 1990s, HDTVs cost on average $4,000-$5,000, Flinn said. But because the technology has gotten older, the TVs now sell for as little as $1,300. HDTVs come as either integrated HDTVs, or as HDTV- ready. Integrated HDTVs are ready to receive a high- definition signal right out of the box, while HDTV-ready sets require additional equipment, such as an HDTV tuner, which allows them to broadcast the high-definition signal. Fitzgerald resident Joe Larkin, who was shopping for HDTVs Saturday at Circuit City, said that he wanted to stop in the store to see what they had available. “I just really wanted to try one for the first time,” Larkin said. “The picture is good quality. It has good color and space. It’s like a home theater.” Doerun man shares love of bluegrass with world
DOERUN — Clyde Scott’s fascination with radio started at an early age. As a 12-year- old in Clinton, Tenn., young Clyde was so taken with local country AM station WYSH that he asked his dad to let him visit the station’s studio during a trip to town. “About three or four hours later, I was ruined,” Scott, now 55 and the owner of broadcast technical maintenance company EME Communications, says of that long-ago visit. Scott spent most of the next couple of decades feeding his radio jones and unwittingly developing a passion that would resurface after a few years in the workday world. That passion manifest itself on Jan. 17, 2004, when Scott’s BluegrassRadio.org made its debut on the Internet. Some 2 1/2 million hits later, BluegrassRadio.org is far and away the No. 1 bluegrass- oriented radio station online. In a medium where having 300 to 400 computers connected to your station at one time is considered huge, Scott’s station averages 700 to 1,000 connections at any given time. “I never dreamed that the station would become what it is,” Scott said. “I’m amazed at the response we’ve gotten, and we started getting it right out of the box. “This is a very niche format, but the people who listen to it are extremely loyal.” The amazing response to BluegrassRadio.org hasn’t gone unnoticed in the music industry. The influential Bluegrass Unlimited magazine selected the station as one of around 30 reporting stations it uses to determine national rankings for the musical genre. “I grew up playing bluegrass music on the radio, and the country music that I heard on stations around here was simply awful,” Scott said. “Around 2000, I started buying bluegrass CDs and pretty soon I had a lot of music. That got me to kicking around the idea of sharing that music like I had before. “When I decided to research online radio, I started ripping the music I’d collected into my computer. After Bluegrass Unlimited named us a reporting station, I haven’t bought a CD since. Record companies send us CDs constantly, as many copies as we want whenever we want them.” Bluegrass fans around the world regularly log onto BluegrassRadio.org to listen to Scott’s mix of traditional and progressive tunes he personally selects. And a growing number of them like what they hear. James Justis, 58, who took early retirement from his materials analyst job with Eastman Chemical Co. in Kingsport, Tenn., found the station by accident, but he’s become an ardent listener. “The first e-mail I sent Clyde, I told him I wish I’d found his station about a month earlier, before I got an XM Radio,” Justis said in a phone conversation from his Kingsport home. “I think Clyde’s taste and mine just coincide. Not long after I heard the music on BluegrassRadio.org, I dropped my XM subscription. “For bluegrass fans, the station offers a great variety; and Clyde plays songs by regional acts that I normally wouldn’t have a chance to hear. I use his Web site to find music that I go out and buy. This is just the best radio I’ve ever heard.” Scott left Tennessee in 1978 to take a job at Albany radio station WJAZ. Two years later he left his first love behind to take a position at Procter & Gamble. Four years into what would be a decade-long stint at P&G, the radio bug that was planted in Scott’s brain started gnawing its way to the surface once again. He started EME Communications in 1984, doing preventative maintenance and upkeep on radio equipment. Six years later, he decided to leave P&G and devote all of his time to his budding business. “It got to the point where it was costing me money not to be doing this full-time,” Scott said. “When I was a kid hanging around WYSH every free second I had — basically annoying the hell out of them — I learned everything I could about radio and radio equipment. “The engineer at the station took me under his wing and taught me everything he knew. It turned out that I had an aptitude for it; I picked it up pretty quickly.” Today Scott travels all over the Southeast, taking care of radio equipment that he admits is rapidly becoming antiquated, a soon-to-be victim of technological advances. “We’re probably in the buggywhip business as far as this equipment goes,” he says. “I’ll be dead before this type of broadcasting is gone, but its days are definitely numbered.” When the desire to start his own station got too strong for Scott to resist, he embraced the new technology growing widespread in the industry. After having DSL lines hooked up at his home, he contacted live365.com, a company that specializes in Internet radio set-up. Thirty minutes after making that initial call, BluegrassRadio.com was streaming music. “Anybody can start an Internet radio station in a matter of about five minutes,” Scott said. “You go to live365.com, and they walk you through everything you need to know. They do the licensing, take care of everything. “We’ve gotten much bigger now and we do our own licensing. But for someone just starting a station, there’s no easier way to go.” Scott said there are a number of differences between Internet and commercial radio, mostly due to Congress’ passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that places restrictions on playing downloaded music. For instance, Internet stations can’t announce in advance what songs they will play, and they must wait at least an hour before playing a song that has been requested. Online stations must also pay fees to Sound Exchange in addition to the “big three” music licensing organizations: Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), the American Association of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) and the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC). “You pay ASCAP based on the people who are listening to your station; BMI and Sound Exchange base their rate on the money you make; and SESAC rates are determined by the number of hits on your Web page,” Scott said. “It can get pretty expensive.” That fact has no doubt discouraged Southwest Georgians from getting in the online radio business. Scott said he knows of no other Internet station in the region. “This was a hobby for me, but it turned into a whole lot more,” he said. “The fact that the station has become pretty much self-supporting (mostly through listener donations) allows me to keep doing this. I program the music myself, and there have been times when I’ve had to make myself get up and go to work. “You have to be careful; once you get started, it’s like a disease. It’ll hook you.” Not that Scott really minds. When e-mails of praise come in from France, Japan, Italy, Israel, China and points all over the globe, he knows he’s achieved his primary goal: He’s shared the music he loves with like-minded fans. “I do this for two reasons,” Scott says. “I love this music, and I love the people who play it.” |
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© 2006 The Albany Herald/Triple Crown Media