Rant du jour: Terrestrial radio

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jasonl

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Of course, as we all know, AM radio is mostly talk and maybe oldies, gospel, country (some play cajun in these parts), and Spanish.

I just got my car from the shop and I haven't had the chance to reinstall my Sirius radio. So I'm cruising the stations. And guess what? Classic rock/oldies/variety: Opie and Anthony, Classic Rock 2: Bob & Tom, Classic Rock 3: Walton & Johnson, KBON : Blah blah blah something about old people, Oldies: blah blah blah blah blah something about farming.

Now I understand why people are turning to Sirius and XM, because of all the darn talk shows in the morning. I do NOT want to hear the news, traffic, weather, blah blah blah, stupid BS about this and that. I want MUSIC.

One of the stations, RED 93.7 used to advertise "We play whatever" and they do have a surprisingly large playlist covering a variety of genres, and they started out with "music mornings" by playing LOTS of music and dissing the other stations for having talk shows. But now, they have one as well.

I'll give KBON the benifit of the doubt because they were talking about Hospice care and they played some Cajun music right afterwards.

But JEEEEZ... I can't wait to put my Sirius reciever back into the Bug so I can get Classic Vinyl and The Vault back. The only talking the DJ does is about the music and the artists. I love it when they give a little background on the song and artist they're playing.

I only wish I could get WTIX again. That was and is the best of the best. If you ever go to New Orleans and want to hear Oldies, It's 94.3 all the way.
 
Jason, I hear there are a couple great Hip-Hop stations in Opelousas on F.M. lol!

(ducking and running up north)
 
not as bad as German radio

Jason, bad as the US talk shows are (and they are, no two ways about it), even worse is the situation with German radio. You either have commercial stations aimed at a narrow demographic and full of blah, blah, blah and even worse music.
Or, alternatively, "Kultursendungen" which bore you to tears with 40 minutes of analysis on what the second audio engineer had for breakfast the morning of the recording followed by a fade out in the middle of the actual music for the mandatory hourly news.
Digital radio failed utterly (was too expensive).
The new attempt might be better, but I am not holding my breath.
UK radio is, in my opinion, the best I've ever heard. (All you folks in the UK don't die of shock now, just 'cause I said something nice...)
 
Radio

I really like the radio here in the UK. Digital is a success here though the quality is not as good as good analogue, primarily because the bit rates aren't high enough.

BBC Radio is commercial free and paid for by us, the public. We pay around £100 a year I think for BBC radio and TV. It's up for debate whether it's worth it etc.....

BBC Radio Two is the most popular station in the country and I would say has the widest playlist. I love it during the day but sometimes not much on Sunday (granny fm) or in the evenings 7-10pm sort of time. There are 4 FM services - 1-4, and 5-7 are digital only. Radio 1 plays mainly chart music and other `cool' music. Radio 3 is classical / jazz and Radio 4 is speech. Radio 5 is sport, 6 is new music, 7 reads stories and books I think.

Classic FM is a great national station (private) playing classical music / requests etc. I love this station.

Local independent stations are good, the only downsize is the limited playlists which even the best one shave. Heart 106.2 is one of the most popular stations in London but it plays `Rescue Me' (Martha Reeve and the Vandellas?) about 5 times a day.

Here are some decent commercial stations in London

Magic 105.4 (most popular station in London, it's probably my favourite too)
Heart 106.2 - Adult contemporary
Capital FM 95.8 - once the most popular, has undergome many image changes and now is mainly AC
XFM 104.9 - sister station to Capital, plays mainly alternative music
Kiss 100 - Dance music
Smooth 102.2 - Smooth R'n'B, light Jazz, soul
Choice FM - R'n'B - aimed mainly at a black audience
Virgin 105.8 - Classic Rock and today's best new music.

And in Chelsmford where I live, Essex FM and Dream 107 are decent stations.

Most if not all the BBC and independent station stream live over the web.

My fave is Magic 105.4, I also listen regularly to Classic FM, Radio Two, Heart 106.2, Virgin 105.8, Essex FM.

I will try to listen to some of the good stations you mention over the web too.

Nick
 
Have to say that I am happy with radio round here too. Being in Lincolnshire, we can get quite a lot of regions so we do have a wide variety of stations. I tend to listen to Radio 1 all of the time, but mum will listen to either Radio 2 or Lincs FM, though I'm not keen on the latter as it seems to be 2 songs - commercials - 2 songs - commercials - traffic update sponsored by Starglaze or whatever - 2 songs - commercials - 2 songs - commercials - news sponsored by Lincolnshire Echo - weather sponsored by Lincoln Saab etc etc etc.

I have to say that I do try to listen to a variety of different stations - but I personally always fall back on Radio 1, my taste of music & it has good talent. Colin & Edith are my particular favourites, as well as Scott Mills, although Chris Moyles' morning show can get a bit annoying (he has the same level of intelligence as a 10 year old).

Nick - this would probably interest you only, but as I mentioned earlier we can get loads of radio stations here cos of our location, and also get 3 or 4 different TV regions. Off the top of my head, we can get BBC Radio Lincolnshire, BBC Radio Leeds, BBC Radio York, BBC Radio Humberside, BBC R Sheffield, BBC R Nottingham, BBC R Leicester, BBC R Norfolk, even BBC R Oxford on some days! Can also pick up commercial stations we shouldn't really be picking up... I'm not sure if this is to do with our local transmitter (Belmont) being the tallest one in the UK or what. Also get a few TV regions too - BBC E.Yorks&Lincs/Yorkshire East (which is the one I prefer), BBC E. Midlands/Central East, BBC East/Anglia East, & BBC Yorks/Yorkshire South (in order of strongest signal). So it is quite an interesting area, TV & Radio wise, to live in! In fact I think Lincoln is one of the few places in the country which is (officially) served by and is on the weathermaps of 3 different BBC TV regions.

Jon
 
Rick, why don't you move out here to one of the 'hoods here in Opelousas, there's plenty of hateful rap stations to listen to. Just hope the locals don't come break into your house and steal your sh*t.

Nick, I bet Virgin 105.8 ROXORZ! I can only imagine the great music that it must play. I'm sure mostly British classic rock mixed with US rock.
 
BBC One

I can get BBC One on Sirius radio. Digital isn't as good as analog radio because of the bitrate. But hearing all music is well worth it. And yes, there's 4 or 5 rap channels that I have conveniently learned to avoid.
 
FM has become everything AM was except for the interference around power lines. I don't know why stations pay so much for so called talent. These people are not stars. They are not entertainment. They are not funny. Like you, Jason, I want to hear music, not the announcer making poor jokes with the traffic reporter or the news reader and then laughing into the microphone so that I can enjoy the whole experience of his finding something hilarious that was so lame it could not walk with 4 crutches. I wonder if all of the talking is a way to cut costs because if they are not playing music, they are not having to pay a royalty. You cut down the number of songs per hour and save money plus you can make more money with more commercials.
 
Jason--- Does Sirius have National Public Radio? I don't have digital radio because the only thing I listen to is NPR's 'News and Information' stations, which are available throughout Minnesota, South Dakota and Iowa, which pretty much encompasses my travel envelope 99% of the time. I have an extensive music collection, so I usually just play my iPod through the car stereo and at home. If I were to get digital radio, it would have to have NPR, as that's what's on in my office and at home if I'm not listening to music.

What's your overall opinion of Sirius?
 
Consolidation...

Has made radio a shadow of its former self. Now, it's mostly programmed from a few central or regional offices, with no regard for regional tastes, and the "personalities" are the most generic, banal, dumbed-down people they can find.

We had a hold-out on the AM dial here in Seattle called KIXI. It was mostly cornball old music, which I enjoy, with the occassional radio drama series (which I love)

KIXI went over to a silly "Music of Your Life" format which is produced out of Florida. It's still cornball old music, but the local DJ's, who had been there a million years and knew fun little antcedotes about the songs, and how they related to Seattle, are all gone.

Other than that, we have a Jazz/NPR station out of Tacoma that is pretty good, and the local NPR news/info station, and Air America, but the rest of it is just drivel. I have XM satelite radio, and that is much better, but I don't have it in the car.
 
I'm not sure if Sirius or XM carries NPR. Go to www.sirius.com and they tell you every channel.

Tom, this morning I decided to just hit "Seek" on the radio. All of the rock/classic rock/oldies/rap/r&b stations had talk shows. Only 2 country stations and KBON was playing music, which is ok with me cause I like country too.
 
Eugene, I don't think NPR is on either satelite service. XM has a channel named - quite wittilly, I think - "XNPR" that has a lot of public radio-type shows, and the host of their morning show is Bob Edwards, previously from "Morning Edition"
 
Sirius has NPR. Got mine for Christmas and installed it in my car. I am so hooked that when we bought my wife a new van (Chrysler Town and Country) in April I made sure it had Sirius built in.

Personally, I listen to Stern in the morning and Bubba the Love Sponge in the afternoon (guilty pleasures).
 
LOL!! I have lived in the hood for 28 years. Everyone here likes me all good...

Jason, I really think you should give NPR a try. I listen to NPR all day long in my office at work. One station is news,talk programs, and jazz (i listen to that one) the other NPR station is classical music.
 
I had the same problem here in the NYC market. I don't mind commercials, but the selection of stations is pathetic and they all play the same 12 songs over and over.

Now, I listen to music on my iPod on the way in, and listen to podcasts of NPR on the way home. I hear what I want to when I want to. No extra monthly fees to XM or Sirius either, after the outlay of cash for the iPod. $200 once seemed more reasonable than another monthly, and then there is the added flexibility of choosing exactly what I want and like.

At work, I usually listen to AOLRadio. Free! and it carries a bunch of XM streams. Or, you could download iTunes on your computer and listen to iTunes Radio, also free. The free streamers are how I find most of the new music I listen to.

Terrestrial radio is a relic, a dinosaur, and shamefully corporate. Moreover, its dull! Just another example of the music industry not "getting it".
 
Thanks for the info, everybody. Minnesota Public Radio has a cool, relatively new station called The Current, which plays a wide variety of rock music, including quite a bit of alternative/indie music. Unfortunately, it's only available in the Minneapolis area, but I listen to it whenever I'm in the city. You never know what you're going to hear next. You'll go from Pink Floyd to The Clash to Tom Waits to Kate Bush to T.Rex within a half-hour. It's great!
 
RED 93.7 in Baton Rouge/Lafayette is like that. At first they advertised "We're all music" and they play a wide variety, BUT they're the same people that turned around and brought a talk show in the mornings. Retards.
 
I'm in northern New Jersey. I listen to Air America and WABC for talk.

Air America is moving to a station with a weak signal that I have a hard time pulling in, so, so much for that.

FM is pretty bad. There was one station I liked for ages---WLIR and WDRE at 92.7, but they have gone "Reggaeton" (rolls eyes)...

I also listen to Jeannie Hopper on the "Liquid Sound Lounge" on WBAI 99.5 on Saturday evenings.

I tried the three-day free online trial at Sirius but cannot justify the expense. I am interested, however, in getting one of the Boston Acoustics "HD" radios, because New York is a large market and many HD stations will have a "Channel Two" with a different format, and there's no subscription.

In London I loved the radio, but for all I know, that may have changed. Ditto for Mannheim, Germany, where I was surrounded by US air bases and there was a LOT of English programming in addition to the local selections.
 
I got my Sirius back in my car so I can have Classic Vinyl again. The only talk on there is when the DJ gives trivia about the band and/or the song. But after that, the music resumes. YAY!
 
I love listening to the Classic Vinyl on Sirius, along with channel 15, recent rock, and the jamming channel too. I can pick these up on my Dish network TV, and the fidelity is NICE. That prompted me to get a Sirius radio for the car, especially because I got a discount being a dish customer. So much for being high fidelity though, the compression artifacts are terrible when picking it up off of an actual radio. My Father has an XM radio in his pickup truck, and I noticed I didn't hear as much compression artifacts. The reason however was because the treble was purposefully rolled off in this radio to mask the issue!

Regular FM radio can sound quite good if the broadcasters would use it to it's full capability. I have a Ramsey FM transmitter that I use for distributing the sound off of my stereo and my ipod out to the shed stereo, and the cars, or while I'm working out in the yard. It's just a little cheapie thing I bought at a hamfest for about $100. The raw, uncompressed, un-equalized sound being fed from it is quite amazing, and you'd have a hard time telling that it wasn't directly off the CD. It will actually push treble well up into the 14K range!

I'm with you Jason, the selection on the radio dial has become quite pathetic. Even the talk radio, or what I call them, rant-radio stations can't even get it right. I tuned into one at quarter till the hour expecting to catch a little Glen beck, but no, for the next 30 minutes, I only heard about 1 minute or so of him, the rest of the time was spent with about 25 minutes of commercials trying to sell me all sorts of snake-oil medications, shady vacation and timeshare deals, or trying to tell me how good their station was. The other 3 minutes were filled with a useless news report with old news at the top of the hour an a traffic report telling me there were no incidents on the highway (even though I was sitting still in traffic!)

The amazing thing is that radio stations cannot seem to wake up and realize that the very thing that is killing their business is what they keep doing! I mean, who wants to hear the same 30 songs over and over. They keep editing songs for time, or talking over top of the beginnings & ends. Audio quality is a common complaint too. If a station would just come on the air and break through all those issues that are common complaints, I imagine it would capture every listener on the dial and make a killing!
 
Commercial and terrestiral radio-got REALLY bad when stations(AM&FM)were bought up from the local ownerns by the huge corporations such as Infinity,Clear Channel,Radio one,etc.Thats when we got the "McDonalds" radio-stations playing boring, monotous talk and music formats.I feel the FCC should put local and national ownership limits on stations and other mass mediums a company can own.Would prevent most of the problems we have been talking about here.I worked in commercial radio for over 20 years and loved it in the earlier times-was fun and interesting.You don't have the fun and interesting contests stations used to have to attract and hold listeners.Advertising clients liked them too, and sponsered them.Helped promote the sponsers products they were trying to advertise.Yes if radio keeps going the way its going-think it will face a bitter end-the giant station owners always seem to forget that people can listen to cassettes,CD,MP3,Ipod-the list goes on.At this point mostly listen to CDs and cassettes in the car-don't listen to the radio much anymore.I hope with the digital "HD radio" formats coming up the station owners don't waste the opertunity.Music can sound like current FM on AM-FM will be as good as CD's currently are or better.With Digital HD radio-music can be back on AM-no more boring obnoxious talk shows.
 

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