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Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio! |
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Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio! |
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In Reply to: Variety of music and the chance . . . posted by sgmlaw on August 2, 2006 at 09:15:19:
Well, I don't think I am a "lemming". Actually I think I am a smart consumer by ditching broadcast radio...why listen to something that is worthless? I don't watch TV, don't pay for cable, so XM is woth it. If XM adds commericals to the stations I enjoy, I might cancel. Under the contract you can do that for a full refund, no penalties, of any remaining months on the contract. On the other hand there is just no place to hear this kind of variety today, so it might even be worth commericals.Sound quality isn't the best, true. But, it isn't terrible. I do remember the consoles you speak of and although they were nice and rich I don't agree AM is better than FM. I care about high fidelity and AM doesn't even have a signal above - what is it - 8,000 Hz? Maybe it's 10,000, I am not sure, but it's far below the limit of the humam ear or what one gets with LPs or CDs. I don't have a 14-speaker Bose system or anything like that, I have a Scott 299 with some Bostons, and just the stock stereo in my Honda. It works OK, in the car it's no different than anything else because of road noise. At home I can tell a difference.
You may be right about FM/AM at one time, but regardless it has not been that way for a long time. Today, there is no choice unless a person is happy with songs they've heard 1,000 times or more. I work with a couple people who listen to FM all day and I don't know how they stand it. It's quite common to hear the same songs repeated after only four or five hours have gone by - and they aren't even that good to begin with. FM gives you access to maybe 0.001% of the music out there. It doesn't even reach 1% of rock music alone.
I am old enough to remember the early 1980's, at least, and since my parents weren't rich we didn't have many albums/tapes and we listened to the radio a lot. Where I grew up (central IL) variety sucked. Sure, there were two or three rock stations with playlists of maybe 250 songs, if you were lucky. Blues station? Forget it, maybe you got it a few hours one night a week on NPR. Jazz? No way - again, maybe NPR has it on Sundays or something like that, but that's all. Bluegrass? Hardly anyone knew what it was. New, breaking rock bands? Maybe, once they were already nationwide. Even then it was stuff that fit the mainstream to a T. I remember lots of Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, old Led Zepplin and Stones, Beatles, Boston, Pink Floyd, REO Speedwagon...the list goes on. (Notice this is the same stuff that's played on FM rock stations today, 25 years later - the conservatism in taste is unreal.) Some of these were good bands sure enough, but the radio didn't even play 1% of what was out there. I guess that what got played in the early 1980's wasn't bad, it's just what was completely ignored that was the problem.
XM gives me a full-time bluegrass station, a full-time old-school country station (not the Dixie Chicks), three full time Jazz stations, R&B (both old style and new, on different stations), several rock stations including your standard classic rock plus a full-time punk station, a full-time unsigned artist station, a 1940's station, a 1950's station that actually plays the stuff on Sun Records and also a lot of bands that at age 33 I had never heard before in my life (and I do like 50's stuff, I even saw the remaining members of Buddy Holly's band a few years ago.) This just scratches the surface.
Maybe FM was different in the major cities, but I doubt that it offered everything that XM does today. Certainly it couldn't have offered it all at the same time, on round-the-clock formats like XM, there just aren't that many stations. I can say that in central IL by the time 1980 rolled around FM left a lot to be desired. Today I live in Chicago but there is still no contest. We have one OK rock station (93.1 WXRT) and one NPR station in the burbs that plays jazz sometimes. It had gotten to the point where I was getting turned off by misic in general just because I was sick of the same stuff over and over. If the variety on XM drops someday, I'll probably ditch XM and look for something else, but for now, it's the best thing out there.
Enjoy the music!
Jon
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Follow Ups
- Re: Variety of music and the chance . . . - Jon C. 18:47:33 08/02/06 (2)
- Variety is king - Gregg 06:07:03 08/07/06 (1)
- Re: Variety is king - Jon C. 10:37:31 08/08/06 (0)
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