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Wednesday, September 24, 2003
On the continuing death of Radio as Usual 
| | That doesn't mean I subscribe, of course. Just that I'm tempted by Sirius and not by XM. Frankly, I'd rather spend the ten bucks a month on my favorite public radio stations. |
| | Speaking of which, it's interesting that plain old AM and FM aren't even in Barnaby's contest. |
| | The truth is, licensed over-the-air broadcasting, which Michael Powell and the FCC made such a big deal about "saving" with their ruling to relax ownership rules in June, is slowly dying in the "marketplace" where users continue to have approximately zero influence on receiver design decisions. The radio manufacturers gave up on AM a long time ago. There's almost no way to get a good AM radio anymore, even if you want one. Choice, which a market requires to express its preferences, just isn't there. AM radios in cars have approximately no treble at all. (Try turning the treble up all the way. It does almost nothing to AM and makes the FM sound chirpy.) The AM tuners in home radios and receivers are even worse. Too often they come with this extremely shitty loop antenna that the user immediately hooks up to the FM terminals on the back of the set, yielding bad FM and no AM at all. On home receivers FM is better than AM only because the default chipsets used by all the car radio manufacturers matured to a far better performance level than their AM counterparts, about a decade ago. Car listening drove development, and listening in a car is more critical (and common) than listenging at home. Conditions vary constantly. Stations get weak with distance, and strong signals can overwhelm weak ones. A radio has to be pretty good to perform at all. Without the same demanding usage conditions, manufacturers felt free to put sucky FM tuners in their home audio receivers. So today, unless you get a high-end FM-only tuner, the FM section of your new home entertainment system can't compete on performance specs with a good analog tuner or receiver built twenty-five years ago, much less a modern car radio. |
| | Back in the old days, the audio stores and salons went out of their way to get good signals into the units on display. Today you're lucky if there's an antenna hooked up at all. But back then radio was still a living, vital medium. Now it's mostly a vending machine for Clear Channel and its wannabes, including, sadly, the public stations that see commercial stations as fund-raising examples, and would rather go after a few big sponsors than thousands of contributing listeners. |
| | "Technology trends start with technologists," Marc Andreessen says. In supply-controlled markets, they also end with them. That's what I see happening with over-the-air broadcasting -- first on TV, then on FM and AM. |
| | Last month I spent a little time looking at audio and video equipment for the house we're remodeling. It quickly became clear that the whole industry has pretty much given up on reception as a value. Except for the extreme few who can afford the equipment required to get HDTV signals over the air, nobody puts up antennas any more. Demand for good reception of anything, frankly, rounds to zero. On TV, the conditions are basically binary, whether you're watching cable or satellite. The signal comes down a pipe, directly from the distributor. It's either strong or absent. How well your set (or your VCR) picks up distant signals over the air is just not a meaningful consideration. When the whole TV system finishes going digital by 2006 (by FCC decree), all that will be left of over-the-air TV is the HDTV stuff almost nobody watches yet, and many of us won't be able to get because we can't put up an antenna that sees the transmitter. |
| | As for the "content," it's all top-down manufacturer/distributor-determined stuff. And that even goes for NPR, to a sad degree (more about that in a later post somewhere). |
| | Which is why I think the future of radio is Webio over wireless IP, fed by the same grass roots originalities that give us both blogging and the equivalent in webcasting. We've got thousands of mostly-free stations to choose from, in spite of the RIAA's and the Library of Congress' best efforts to regulate the shit out of this new and promising industry. |
| | All we need is a new kind of webio receiver (not just a computer and its allied MP3 player), and a new kind of disto system based on syndication, rather than just transmission. |
VoWC
Fallnight
| | The Fall Equinox came yesterday, making today the first full day of the new season, and the first when nightdark outlasts daylight. |
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