Where are you? Do you know what your FM is doing?

Seattle: If I were being really generous, I'd say there is one jazz station (KPLU) and one classical station (KING-FM) in the greater Seattle area with decent to good FM reception. Both stations, however, program middle-of-the-road material.

There are a few FM stations that do somewhat more adventurous programming (the college radio stations mostly), but they are all low-power, fairly low fidelity broadcasters. The remainder of the stations are crap.

I could not, in good conscience, recommend to anyone in Seattle that they invest in a high-quality FM tuner.

Response to PeterS and Cylinderking:

I live at the south end of Lake Washington, on a hill overlooking Renton, so I have a fairly clean reception path. I use a decent Proton tuner with outside antenna which is capable of good performance within this broadcast area.

I did not include Canadian stations in my comments, since they are not, strictly speaking, in the Seattle market. Also, Canadian stations threaten our way of life because they feature too much culture (grin).

My assessment of the quality of FM broadcasting is obviously just my personal opinion, but on the whole I find the FM stations here are pretty dismal -- particularly compared to what they were when I moved to Seattle nearly 40 years ago.

I grew up listening to jazz on WMAL radio in Washington DC, which had one of the finest evening jazz programs in the country from 7PM-midnight, Monday thru Friday. The MC was Felix Grant, a near-legend over the years among jazz radio hosts. WMAL had a strong, uncompressed signal, and Felix Grant set the bar very high for superb jazz programming. The only person I have heard on jazz or classical radio stations that comes close to Grant is Jim Wilke, who does a jazz program and jazz calendar feature for KPLU, the NPR station located at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma.

Sadly, there are very few really good FM stations still in business -- and the operative term here is "business". Many of the stations have gone to canned formats with very formulaic music, and I find that after listening to most local stations for more than a few days at a time, you hear the same music being recycled. KPLU-FM and KING-FM do feature well-informed radio hosts who select good music and have intelligent commentary about the selections. A few of the small campus radio stations, such as KCBS (Bellevue Community College), offer very eclectic and sometimes challenging music, but the transmitter signal is weak and the audio signal of marginal quality.

Over the past 15 years, many of the local AM and FM stations that featured good programming and decent-to-good, relatively uncompressed signal quality have been purchased by large radio and media chains. I realize that others in the Seattle area may not agree with my opinion about the quality of FM broadcasting here, but the trend has been downhill for the past two decades.