They did it last year too. Same host. Lots of interviews and a good playlist. My wife and I enjoyed it last year. Not able to listen today

The only drawback is the music played on that show don't show up on Boom's "recently played" list.

Boom was #1 by a very significant margin during this special.

jughead jones wrote:

It's a poor man's Sirius XM's 80s on 8.

I have SiriusXM radio again for a few months after a two year layoff.  I must say 70's on 7 and 80's on 8 have both gone downhill during that time.  70's on 7 plays a lot of the songs from our many lists regarding tunes that make you change the dial.  Too many that I didn't like in 1975/76 and still don't like.

 Just this morning they played Disco Duck for the second time in two days and last week I heard Gerry Rafferty's Right Down the Line three times in three days.  I like that song, but something is off since I didn't have the channel on much last week.  I have noticed that both channels don't put the effort into the station breaks like they did about 5 years ago and I have started to explore the (too many) other stations they are offering.

Also annoying, Sirius is chopping some songs abruptly for some reason.  Guitar Man by Bread was cut way before the song ended for some reason and slammed into the next song.   Announcers on both channels are very average but the early afternoon host (I think 70's on 7) seems to be broadcasting from Edmonton.

The sound quality is spotty at times and the only real advantage is the lack of commercials.  Music wise so far I would likely take BOOM over 80's on 8 and 90's on 9.  Both stations have a lot of "B" hits that I am not familiar with.

Because of this forum I learned of a Palm Springs radio station called KGAY 106.5 & 92.1. I've been listening to them online almost daily for more than a year.

KGAY plays a very wide variety of music from the 70s through 2025.  Sure, most is dance music but once in a while you'll hear Coldplay or even The Black Keys. 

It's not the same 100 or so songs every day like on Boom but in a re-arranged order.  A song you hear today, you might not hear again for several days or even for more than a week.  A New York Times story about the station said their music library has more than 900 songs.

They have live DJs, dance mixes at noon (PST) and while they're focused on the Cochella Valley they regularly point out where people are listening to them online.

RadioAaron wrote:

Boom played 797 different songs over the past week.

A week that had two days of extended special programming. Any idea what the total of a week without would be?

mace wrote:

I have never had SiriusXM and judging by the above comments, I doubt I ever will. For a wide variety of music I rely on AccuRadio, which I believe RA mentioned recently.

All depends on your preferences, Deep Tracks and Underground Garage are unmatched by anything on terrestrial radio and 60's Gold is better than any oldies station in the area. I might listen to 70's radio if it went up to 1974 but there was just too much dross in the the latter part of the decade. Most of the 80's music I like is available on Underground Garage and even Deep Tracks. 
 

Boy, that's true. 

In its history, Sirius has never really gone deep; it was a completely different mindset to XM, and it's never been more evident than today with the way the channels are programmed.  Sirius always felt like it was for people who didn't care that much what came out of their radio, programmed by broadcasters who read too many of their own press releases, whereas at XM, content and quality were king.  

Bandwidth was always an ongoing challenge; there's only so much data that can be transmitted from the satellite, and it's allocated between channels depending on the programming and audience.  The only channels we couldn't screw with at XM were the country/trucker channels.  They said XM was founded on the truckers, and they couldn't be touched.  But if Classical were doing a 5.1 special or something fancy, they'd get a chunk of bandwidth moved over from the 90s, 80s and especially the 60s, 50s and talk channels.  When we launched Canada 360 was an 8k audio channel and a good phone line sounded better.   

Washington would never discuss bandwidth allocation but if you had one of the portable XM Recorder units, you could tell what the bandwidth was on a channel by letting it record for a couple of hours and seeing how much storage data was chewed up.  I had a bunch of radios going just to keep an eye on what was being allocated.

One of the nice things about working there was the ability to monitor 'board feeds' versus 'off-air' feeds.  CD audio quality?? Maybe so..  if the cd sounded like shit ;).  If you couldn't compare the two, it sounded okay.

paterson1 wrote:

jughead jones wrote:

It's a poor man's Sirius XM's 80s on 8.

I have SiriusXM radio again for a few months after a two year layoff.  I must say 70's on 7 and 80's on 8 have both gone downhill during that time.  70's on 7 plays a lot of the songs from our many lists regarding tunes that make you change the dial.  Too many that I didn't like in 1975/76 and still don't like.

 Just this morning they played Disco Duck for the second time in two days and last week I heard Gerry Rafferty's Right Down the Line three times in three days.  I like that song, but something is off since I didn't have the channel on much last week.  I have noticed that both channels don't put the effort into the station breaks like they did about 5 years ago and I have started to explore the (too many) other stations they are offering.

Also annoying, Sirius is chopping some songs abruptly for some reason.  Guitar Man by Bread was cut way before the song ended for some reason and slammed into the next song.   Announcers on both channels are very average but the early afternoon host (I think 70's on 7) seems to be broadcasting from Edmonton.

The sound quality is spotty at times and the only real advantage is the lack of commercials.  Music wise so far I would likely take BOOM over 80's on 8 and 90's on 9.  Both stations have a lot of "B" hits that I am not familiar with.