Rant du jour: Terrestrial radio

[Cybrvanr]

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!

 

[tolivac]

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.