FM Radio is dead ....R.I.P

Mitch4t, you may be right about the variety that Pandora can offer, and I can see how Pandora helps you discover new music. But my initial point is that a good local radio station can offer something that the internet cannot, and that is a sense of community.

It may be my particular strangeness that I can only listen to an internet stream for so long before I feel kind of disconnected and disoriented. It is the same sensation I get after playing a video game for too long.

Music has always been a very social thing for me, whether I am listening to it or playing it myself. I guess I just like knowing where my music is coming from, who is choosing it, which ensemble and conductor recorded it, when it was recorded and so on. I must be getting old.....

FM Radio is very popular in NY.
Alot of these FM stations are getting great ratings.
As long as FM Radio is free its going to be popular.

Doug99, do you mean throughout the state or just in NYC? I lived for several years in Stony Brook. I had good tuners at the time such as the Marantz 10B which was not a champ at receiving NYC radio. It was very convenient to have FM. Even today in Texas I listen to FM but only NPR is any good both in content and fidelity. Each summer I go to NM's mountains and have to cross the wastelands of central and western Texas. Once I am there I again can get NPR and only listen to that. If NPR broadcasts jazz, I listen to that and if they broadcast classical, I listen to that.

xm (and to a lesser extent pandora) completely ruined fm for me--except for a couple of hard-to-get, sporadically good college stations, fm is a complete abyss in my town. that said, the audio quality of xm has always disappointed--it's not nearly as good as advertised--and on the rare occssions i do hear fm i'm surprised at how much better it sounds.

Even though I have a high quality CD player and turntable, probably 80% of my listening is to FM radio- exclusively to the two local NPR stations,which have not only an compelling section of classical, jazz, folk, contemporary, classic rock and alternative music but also broadcast in fidelity that is deserving of a primary musical source. I have a highly regarded tuner (well maybe not *that* highly regarded in the fmtunerinfo site) that has been somewhat modified and is fed by a 17 element FM antenna.

Here for example is a sample, fed directly into an external CD-recorder (no preamp in the path). Listen to it on your main systems-although it sounds perfectly fine on desktop speakers it is quite stunning on my main rig-as it should be on yours. The people who I have played this for who are unaware of its provenance, look in disbelief when the announcers voice enters after the track ends. Judge for yourselves.

FM Tuner sample