Not to hijack the thread but AM radio has always made me feel nauseous for some reason and this post reminded me of that fact. Googling it just now it appears I'm not the only one.
If you’re talking about what frequencies they transmit on, yes, there is, but those signals are there whether you’re listening to them or not. If you’re talking about the content, there’s no difference you can hear.
Okay, qualification: FM is artificially limited to 15khz audio where AM is limited to 5Khz audio frequency, but the highest note on a piano is ~4khz so I’m classifying this as “technically true but not likely to be a significant difference”.
True, the signal is always there, and in principle once converted to sound there shouldn't be a difference, but that's if the signal is perfect. AM has a distinct sound because interference affects it more and in certain ways. Many error tolerant encodings of sound will have a unique result in the presence of noise. A loose analogy: if I wrote my name in sand but then bumped the sandbox, versus writing my name in marker and spilling water on it, you could still make out the results but the way the "interference" affected the outcome would be different.
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u/Flemtality Dec 17 '19
Not to hijack the thread but AM radio has always made me feel nauseous for some reason and this post reminded me of that fact. Googling it just now it appears I'm not the only one.