CYBER SOUNDS

I read with great interest the Pop Eye article about Internet radio (Jan. 11), in which KNAC’s Long Paul states that “as far as I know, we are the first to do anything of this nature.”

Paul’s memory is extremely short. We carried his “Instrumentals of Rock” program at Hard-Radio, the Internet’s No. 1 radio station. The show was canceled by the program’s syndicator.

HardRadio (https://www.hardradio.com) specializes in the hard rock/heavy metal genre and our online station was one of the pioneers of Internet radio over two years ago. I’m sure that the L.A.-based broadcast trade journals know us. We were the first “cyberstation” ever featured in Radio & Records (April 1996), and we also report our weekly playlist to the Album Network.

An online sound bite of Long Paul promoting his “Instrumentals of Rock” show on HardRadio can be found on the Internet in streaming real audio format at https://www.hardradio.com/ior.ram.

TRACY BARNES

President, HardRadio

Rowlett, Texas

I am always listening to Hard-Radio as my background music at work. It streams in and takes up no space on my hard drive and is better than anything on the radio in L.A.

I urge anyone who liked KNAC to visit a real hard-rock music station. Not only do they have a better selection (they claim 1,000-plus digitized songs) and better quality than this new KNAC site (I checked), but they play music 24/7 . . . no commercials, no deejays’ yak-yak to interrupt the songs. What station of any kind can make that statement?

BOB MICHAELS

Pasadena