4 ms·

Kind of both. It's a transmission method (amplitude modulation) that's very lo-fi which leads to it rarely being used for music, which dominates other radio. So

• bityard 4y ago
  "very lo-fi" is pretty relative... FM offered higher quality audio, but that came mostly from the fact that it was not as prone to interference. (And yes, it was stereo instead of mono, but I think stereo AM became a thing eventually.) Other than that, if the station you were listening to was not far away, there wasn't really any difference in perceptible quality _if_ you had a decent receiver and antenna, which most people didn't. It was cheaper and easier to make an FM radio that sounded good compared to AM. If you tool around the HF ham bands at night, sometimes you will catch a couple of hams conversing in AM near the top of 40 meters. The ones that have spent some time tweaking their audio and transmitter sound like they're sitting right next to you. Very crisp and clear, especially next to single side-band!