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Sunday, September 28, 2003
Beyond Radio 
| | Streaming will never take off until it's portable. If I can carry a web radio with me great. As long as your a tethered to the computer you're still nowhere. |
| | Revisited my review of XM and it still has the same suck issues on spoken word. Sounds like a phone line feed of most of it. Sirius does not have that problem. |
| | Sony is going to enter the DRM space shortly. DRM is digital via shortwave. The issues like skywave problems that beset US IBOC digital, and't an issue here. |
| | You can still get great sounding AM radios, you just have to look. |
| | I totally agree about streaming taking off. That's why in The Syndication Solution I challenged folks to invent a webio. The big consumer electronics guys aren't going to do it because they're in bed too deeply with the record industry, and they dread the DRM issues. A webio won't work unless it has no DRM at all. Like any radio today. |
| | As for great sounding AM radios, I have to disagree. I have no less than two GE SuperRadios, which are terrific for the money. But they're not audiophile quality, and they're not stereo. My wife's old '92 Infiniti Q45 had a terrific Bose AM receiver that did stereo remarkably well. Infiniti "de-contented" AM stereo in 1994, using the same shitty tuner they put in Nissan's Maxima line. That's what's in my wife's '95 Q45. Listening to it is torture. |
| | There are still a smattering of AM stereo radios in older cars. I don't know of any new cars (and I rent quite a few) that still feature it. Far as I know, nearly all of the radios and tuners shown here are no longer being manufactured. Most were hen's teeth when they were new, too. That even goes for the days when I saved up to buy a Nordmende portable radio (in the pic above) in 1967. That thing was killer. It even had a backplane that made it work in a bracket as a car radio, with the car's own speaker(s) and outside antenna. |
| | Doc Searls¹ The Continuing Death of Radio as Usual is definitely worth reading. I¹ll buy most of what he says, but I still think there is plenty of beautiful music on the radio. That plus some advice on how best to enjoy it. |
| | If you live in or near a big city, my experience is that there¹s good stuff on the air. I travel in the States quite a bit, and in my rent-a-car I can usually find interesting music and intelligent talk, mostly over at the left side of the FM dial. |
| | Yes, most big cities in the U.S. have at least one classical and one jazz station, and they're mostly noncommercial (the ghetto for those is at the left end of the dial, from 88-92 MHz). But the innovation level in the business overall — including its noncommercial quarters — still rounds to zero. On jazz and classical stations, the offerings are still mostly pro forma. That they exist at all is a swell thing; but the life has mostly left the radio corpse, and the remaining Good Music stations are just the bones that haven't rotted away yet. |
| | Tim also recommends expensive receiving equipment that I frankly still envy (but can't justify buying). Still, I agree with him about everything but antennas. While the $35 Magnum Dynalab Silver Ribbon, which Tim recommends, is an excellent (and non-ugly) indoor antenna, a big nasty directional outdoor antenna on a rotator will blow the socks off anything you can use indoors. Winegard makes some outstanding directional antennas. The HD6065P is the one I plan to put up on the new house we'll build in a few years, if there's still anything left on the dial. |
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| | When I lived in North Carolina, I used a Finco FM-5 to receive over 1000 different FM stations on a little old KLH Model 18 tuner (above). I rotated the antenna by hand on a pole outside my living room window. I could tune to 88.5, point it NNE and get WAMU from Washington, D.C., over 220 miles away. Then I could point it WNW and get WFDD from Winston-Salem on the same channel, with no interference on either station. And neither had huge signals. The farthest stations I could get reliably were in Morehead, KY, Athens, OH and Pittsburgh, PA. There isn't an indoor antenna made that can do the same. |
| | I also had fun in the late Spring and early Summer, when the E layer of the ionosphere would occasionally become reflective of FM and lowband (Channels 2-6) TV signals, bringing in stations from a geographical arc that ranged from 800-1200 miles away. Over the years there, I listened to stations in a great circle that ran from Mexico and Texas up through the Great Plains and across Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes and down to Bermuda, the Bahamas and Cuba. It was fun getting that stuff, and I still miss the sport of it (I've never heard the phenomenon here in California). But today the signals I get from all over the world on my laptop sound better, on the whole, and are far more varied and lively. So, what I loved about radio, now dying, is finally coming to life with webio. |
| | And that's the best hope for radio too. In time, much of the content on the AM, FM and satellite bands will originate from webio — in other words, from the homes and workplaces of talented individuals who jock together music, talk, news, interviews, comedy or whatever. Just as blogs will do the same for print journals. |
| | All we need now are: 1) good portable radios (not just computers); 2) a common and open directory schema (the equivalent of a "band" and a way to "tune"); and 3) syndication for every station and every program — so we (or our devices) know what's on, how to find it, and (if the device is a PAR — personal audio recorder) when to record it. |
May your banner yet waive
| | It was pointed out to me recently that this blog might be able to make good money by making room for Google's AdSense advertising, which I think is what we're currently see on blogspot blogs. |
| | Presumably I'll get a share of the revenues for making the space available (what would be the point otherwise?). And since AdSense does its best to make the ads appropriate, the ads might even add value to the blog. I've always thought that creating advertising that users actually demand (rather than loathe), and that adds value (rather than subtracts it) is the holy grail of the business. I've also said that Google is closer to achieving it than anybody else I've seen. |
| | Although I have never had any intention to make money with this blog, or to put advertising on it, I'm still wondering.... can it be done? Will Google do AdSense on any blogs other than Blogger's? Says here In general, we do not accept personal pages, chat sites, or blogs into the AdSense program. However, if a site contains targeted, text-based content and/or provides a product or service, we may consider it for participation. In other words, it's a judgement call (unless the blogs happen to be Google's own). |
| | So I just applied. Be fun to see what happens. |
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