Do you still listen to AM/FM radio?

My last set AM/FM/black-white TV expired some years ago so I stopped listening FM (not used for the rest).
If a radio is available I go for pure music FM stations.

After the third radio from my current car was stolen I did not replace it. I used it for music, full time.

In 40 years I used AM once, to listen the final game of a World Cup, while driving maybe to my parents home.

Nowadays when I read, to keep myself focused, I tend to turn music off.

dr pepper said:

Tomi, I dont mean to be miserable however cassette's are obsolete, so your rad/cass will be too at least partially.

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Well the cassette deck is broken anyway! But in fairness, it has given me good service over the years.

Maybe one day I'll fix it and will be able to call it "vintage" and sell it for some silly price...

I replaced my cassette deck with a portable MP3 player with a hard drive in it.

I was an FM fanatic. Mom is an AM fanatic because of the talk shows. AM is difficult to receive at home. Fidelity sucks in the car. With lots of signal processing; A Carver TX1-11, a dbx 4bx expander, it sounded really well with a response to either 15 or 18 kHz. Basically the limits. The tuner is analog A Technics ST-9030. With an antenna a rotator it was not uncommon to get 3 stations on the same frequency depending on direction.

My interest in music stopped when CD;s came out. They don;t sound right. I think you need at least 60 Khz, because you's like to reproduce a 20 kHz SQUARE wave, not a sine wave and Fourier theory suggests more. The bone heads used sine waves and hearing ability. Shape of the waveform is missing. The Nyquest criteria only applies to sine waves, I believe.

The speaker can reduce the bandwidth, but the amplifier has to try, Rolled off to 40 kHz is the minimum. With an amp capable of a slew rate of 100 V/us and and unrolled off bandwidth of 0-800 kHz, it's outside the normal bounds or nearly any stereo amplifer and it sounds good. It is intentionally rolled off from 0.5 to 40 Khz. The pre-amp is good from 0 to 100 kHz.

I'll take a signal processed analog recording any day. Cars don;t have mute buttons, but the off switch is convienient. I don;t like people yelling - I get enough of that. Commercials and Sitcoms are prime examples.

Take like a TV program like Gunsmoke and compare it to some modern sitcom, People talked so you could understand them in the old shows.

Garbage in - garbage out. Most AM/FM radio can be classified as noise. Silence is better than noise.

EDIT: Changed tuner model

KeepItSimpleStupid said:

I think you need at least 60 Khz, because you's like to reproduce a 20 kHz SQUARE wave, not a sine wave and Fourier theory suggests more. The bone heads used sine waves and hearing ability. Shape of the waveform is missing. The Nyquest criteria only applies to sine waves, I believe.

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Can you hear the difference between a 20 KHz sine wave Vs a square wave when played back on any common speaker?

I have above average hearing for a guy in his mid 40's but I'm still deaf as a post to any frequency over ~ 18 Khz.

And BTW, My MP3's are typically made at 320 KHz sampling rates unless the memory device I have them on is limited for space. As for CD's, I haven't listened to one for years since compact high capacity memory devices came out. No point in carrying around <20 songs on a easily scratched disk that skips when I can carry around hundreds of songs on a USB stick.

atferrari said:

I stopped listening

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We have talked about the death of radio.

My father heard his first radio, pre-world war 2. After WW1.
Radios were 2 to 3 months wages. Hand made oak cabinets. Very large.
The closest neighbors got a radio and on Saturday and Wednesday nights every one came over to listen. There were "murder mysteries", comedies and 50% commercials. My Dad had night mares until he learned the murder mysteries were fiction.

The antenna ran out the window, to the top of the house, to the close line, then to a tree. You needed 100(s) of feet of wire.
Dad and Cousin walked 1/2 mile to the neighbors house and would sit under his window to listen. (must be quite)
These radios took minutes to worm up. Then for the next 15 minutes, until the temperature stabilized, you had to retune regularly.
My dad learned, if he touched the antenna, the radio detuned, audio level dropped and static increased. The neighbor swore and would get up and walk across the room and turn knobs. This quickly became a game. How many times can you make the neighbor get up. Commercials never had static but the most suspenseful parts of the program had static. After 1/2 hour of this game the radio went flying out the window. Two boys ran for home.

I have a similar set, a philco from the 30's, just a little higher end, it has preset stations and Afc, octal valves and pine case, weighs 50lb and sounds great.
Also have a Uk wartime receiver, it no doubt has had some keen listeners in its life.
Fortunately neither look as though they've been chucked out the window.

ronsimpson said:

We have talked about the death of radio.

My father heard his first radio, pre-world war 2. After WW1.
Radios were 2 to 3 months wages. Hand made oak cabinets. Very large.
The closest neighbors got a radio and on Saturday and Wednesday nights every one came over to listen. There were "murder mysteries", comedies and 50% commercials. My Dad had night mares until he learned the murder mysteries were fiction.

The antenna ran out the window, to the top of the house, to the close line, then to a tree. You needed 100(s) of feet of wire.
Dad and Cousin walked 1/2 mile to the neighbors house and would sit under his window to listen. (must be quite)
These radios took minutes to worm up. Then for the next 15 minutes, until the temperature stabilized, you had to retune regularly.
My dad learned, if he touched the antenna, the radio detuned, audio level dropped and static increased. The neighbor swore and would get up and walk across the room and turn knobs. This quickly became a game. How many times can you make the neighbor get up. Commercials never had static but the most suspenseful parts of the program had static. After 1/2 hour of this game the radio went flying out the window. Two boys ran for home.

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That little **** lol.

tcmtech said:

Can you hear the difference between a 20 KHz sine wave Vs a square wave when played back on any common speaker?

I have above average hearing for a guy in his mid 40's but I'm still deaf as a post to any frequency over ~ 18 Khz.

And BTW, My MP3's are typically made at 320 KHz sampling rates unless the memory device I have them on is limited for space. As for CD's, I haven't listened to one for years since compact high capacity memory devices came out. No point in carrying around <20 songs on a easily scratched disk that skips when I can carry around hundreds of songs on a USB stick.

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I'm only 33 and my hearing cuts out at 13kHz for some reason. I never went to any concerts or used earphones/headphones and only to a club a few times. I'm not sure if there is some other cause. Audiologist said that the hearing I do have is like a baby's hearing, except the high frequencies are completely lopped off. Hasn't always been that way since I used to be able to at least hear the 15kHz humm of a CRT.

ronsimpson said:

We have talked about the death of radio.
The closest neighbors got a radio and on Saturday and Wednesday nights every one came over to listen. There were "murder mysteries", comedies and 50% commercials.

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Of course no TV back then:
For us young'uns we made sure were home at 6am for: -- Dick Barton - Special Agent it was a popular radio thriller serial broadcast in the BBC Light Program between 7 October 1946 and 30 March 1951. it was aired in 15-minute episodes at 6.45
It achieved a peak audience of 15million.
Now I listen to FM radio for music, alternatively a Bose Mini for piped in music link offering genre selection.
Max.

dknguyen said:

That little **** lol.

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My grandmother called them "Those two Hellions."
Don't know what google translate will do with that word. There must be an equivalent in every language.

dknguyen said:

I'm only 33 and my hearing cuts out at 13kHz for some reason. I never went to any concerts or used earphones/headphones and only to a club a few times. I'm not sure if there is some other cause. Audiologist said that the hearing I do have is like a baby's hearing, except the high frequencies are completely lopped off. Hasn't always been that way since I used to be able to at least hear the 15kHz humm of a CRT.

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I had a major hearing test back a number of years ago and tested way above expected for my age and lifes lines of work. The gal that went over my test scores commented that I must have lived a pretty quiet life given at age late 30's my hearing was as good or better than most people of their teens and early 20's college kids she tested. I told her, Nope! I have abused my hearing since day one!

I grew up in the country and had worked around loud tractors and farm machinery all my life, plus from my junior year in high school until my mid 20's drove a vehicle with a 1000+ watt sound system that was always turned up way too loud, and then went on to work in heavy industrial environments and rarely ever wore hearing protection after that.

Apparently I am immune to damage from exposure to anything under 130 dB!

Most young human beings can hear as high as 20kHz. When I was young I heard ultrasonic burglar alarms.
Why does anybody want to hear the harmonics of a 20kHz squarewave when the fundamental is 20kHz, the 2nd harmonic is 40kHz that nobody can hear, the 3rd harmonic is 60kHz that nobody can hear, etc.
For a sound system to produce 20kHz without it being reduced much, the response should be no less than -3dB at 40kHz.

The average person experiences a few very loud noises that damage their hearing. Either the noises or old age reduces how high people can hear. A graph of hearing loss with age and amount of frequency rolloff shows the average 25 years old man losing the highest frequencies a little and by the age of 40, most men need a hearing aid and reading glasses.

When I was 69 I complained that everybody mumbled and radio and TV engineers rolled off the highs to prevent hiss and hid the mics under clothing so they could not be seen (which cuts highs).
A hearing aids store opened in my neighbourhood and offered a free hearing test and demo hearing aids. The test showed that I had normal hearing for my age: severe high frequency hearing loss of about -40dB! I was shocked but even more shocked when the demo hearing aids were turned up to max to correct the high frequency loss. I guess needed time to get used to normal hearing again.
I got a second opinion because maybe they faked the test and the second hearing aids store test showed exactly the same high frequency hearing loss. But they programmed the hearing aids with just a little high frequency boost and I liked it. 2 weeks later they programmed a little more boost and I liked it. 2 weeks later they programmed the hearing aids so that my hearing was young again and a month later I bought them.

My hearing aids are so comfortable and sound so good that I forget I am wearing them. A tiny battery in each hearing aid lasts for about 10 days when I do not wear them when sleeping. They do things that normal hearing cannot do:
1) They compress very loud sounds without distortion. When there are no sounds they produce zero hiss.
2) A setting (from a button on either hearing aid) has much extra sensitivity so I can hear what people are talking about very far away.
3) Another setting that has noise reduction. There are 4 mics (left front, right front, left rear and right rear) and one or two mics turn on when they receive speech.
4) Another setting for hifi music that has compression, anti-feedback and noise reduction turned off.
5) A hearing aid detects the magnet in a phone and provides the telephone sounds in both ears.
6) Another setting for muting when a dog is barking or a baby is crying.

tcmtech said:

I had a major hearing test back a number of years ago and tested way above expected for my age and lifes lines of work. The gal that went over my test scores commented that I must have lived a pretty quiet life given at age late 30's my hearing was as good or better than most people of their teens and early 20's college kids she tested. I told her, Nope! I have abused my hearing since day one!

I grew up in the country and had worked around loud tractors and farm machinery all my life, plus from my junior year in high school until my mid 20's drove a vehicle with a 1000+ watt sound system that was always turned up way too loud, and then went on to work in heavy industrial environments and rarely ever wore hearing protection after that.

Apparently I am immune to damage from exposure to anything under 130 dB!

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Yeah, one of my coworkers rides motor cycles and goes to concerts and his hearing is signficantly better than mine. I don't get it and it sucks because I'm a musician and audiophile. If I weren't, it wouldn't matter.

audioguru said:

Most young human beings can hear as high as 20kHz. When I was young I heard ultrasonic burglar alarms.
Why does anybody want to hear the harmonics of a 20kHz squarewave when the fundamental is 20kHz, the 2nd harmonic is 40kHz that nobody can hear, the 3rd harmonic is 60kHz that nobody can hear, etc.
For a sound system to produce 20kHz without it being reduced much, the response should be no less than -3dB at 40kHz.

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Yep, Very little music has any serious amount of frequency content above 16 - 17 KHz and what does is rarely going to be noticed by most listeners simply due to it low emphasise plus the far less sensitivity of the human ear at that range plus standard FM that most would find in any vehicle is dead above ~15 KHZ anyway.

That's the part of the audiophile mind I never understood. In any application beyond the idealistically perfect audio setting nothing above 15KHz matters.

dknguyen said:

Yeah, one of my coworkers rides motor cycles and goes to concerts and his hearing is signficantly better than mine. I don't get it and it sucks because I'm a musician and audiophile. If I weren't, it wouldn't matter.

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The downside oteh Genetic lottery! Everyone gets what they get whether they wanted it or not. Bad lower backs run in my family and I pulled the winning ticket on that lottery draw and I can say for sure would happily give up my hearing above 10Khz to not have chronic lower back pain and a debilitating range of movement 50+% of the time.

tcmtech said:

The downside oteh Genetic lottery! Everyone gets what they get whether they wanted it or not. Bad lower backs run in my family and I pulled the winning ticket on that lottery draw and I can say for sure would happily give up my hearing above 10Khz to not have chronic lower back pain and a debilitating range of movement 50+% of the time.

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I have that too, though perhaps my back and joint pains aren't as debilitating. They used to be though. And extremely bad eye sight, taste, and smell. My main power ups are resistant-to-cancer, and immunity to heart disease and baldness.

Externet said:

Mostly while driving. Once I modified my car radio into 4-band shortwave, and that was fun, as I understand half a dozen languages.

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My dad was language-adept. Spoke 6, taught 3 at the high school and college levels. I made sure he had two short wave radios working at all times (gotta have a backup) so he could stay up on changes in dialect, local idioms, etc.

Radio is my personal religion. I was raised on AM, shifted to FM when the music moved, and worked my way through school in broadcasting. The ad-to-music ratio is getting worse, but I compensate with pushbutton tuners. Radio always is on in the car, and usually at home. I haven't made the jump to satellite yet, but I suspect that Santa will kick in one of these years. Over the years I've written a couple of history blurbs, one on radio and one on cell phones.

ak

AnalogKid said:

worked my way through school in broadcasting.

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me to,
I worked at radio and took engineering in school.
I had press passes to all the cool concerts, or I worked the sound system.

ronsimpson said:

me to,
I worked at radio and took engineering in school.
I had press passes to all the cool concerts, or I worked the sound system.

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Classroom EE during the day, built a TV station at night, helped install the new FM studios and master control. Worked freelance for ESPN, Sugarman, Turner, CBS, Telemation.

ak