Yes, they do suck. There is very limited dynamic range on most stations these days. Most pop recordings in the first place are poorly recorded with limited dynamic range. Everything just sounds LOUD.
Todays Raido Stations suck
Is it just me, or does todays Radio suck?
When I was a teenager FM was cool, it had laid back D,jays and they played cool new music. That's were I first heard Alex Harvey, Hawkwind,Atomic Rooster,Zappa,The amboy dukes,
Robin Trower,Roxy music,BOC,Captain Beyond,Audience,
Bowie,Steely Dan,etc.
The AM of that day used to be Hit Radio, and played the top hits of the day.
FM today has become Hit radio, with a lot of cookie cutter stations all playing the same old hits, with a few of those old fm classic hits as well.
Does it only bug me, that they only play the one hit off the LP over and over again. When in fact the lp had even better tunes on it, but they never play them.
Recently with the advent of eBay, I have been able to collect a lot of rare and Great music that I never new existed before.
When my friends here the new tunes I have They get the same Idea that I always get, to start a new radio station that plays this unknown treasure. As well as the songs like "Candys gone bad" off of the Golden Earring lp with Radar love on it, you know the one.
You know what I'm talking about, am I alone here.
I must state that I live in a smaller town now, but we can still pick up the Jacksonville Florida stations.
Does this kind of practice go on all over the country?
The new music of today no longer interests me with Rap and the Rock of today all sounds the same, with only minor exceptions like Radiohead.
WHAT do you think, is their some stations that I could pickup on the internet that would satisfy my craving?
would you like to be able to get in you car and tune the radio to a station like the one I described?
When I was a teenager FM was cool, it had laid back D,jays and they played cool new music. That's were I first heard Alex Harvey, Hawkwind,Atomic Rooster,Zappa,The amboy dukes,
Robin Trower,Roxy music,BOC,Captain Beyond,Audience,
Bowie,Steely Dan,etc.
The AM of that day used to be Hit Radio, and played the top hits of the day.
FM today has become Hit radio, with a lot of cookie cutter stations all playing the same old hits, with a few of those old fm classic hits as well.
Does it only bug me, that they only play the one hit off the LP over and over again. When in fact the lp had even better tunes on it, but they never play them.
Recently with the advent of eBay, I have been able to collect a lot of rare and Great music that I never new existed before.
When my friends here the new tunes I have They get the same Idea that I always get, to start a new radio station that plays this unknown treasure. As well as the songs like "Candys gone bad" off of the Golden Earring lp with Radar love on it, you know the one.
You know what I'm talking about, am I alone here.
I must state that I live in a smaller town now, but we can still pick up the Jacksonville Florida stations.
Does this kind of practice go on all over the country?
The new music of today no longer interests me with Rap and the Rock of today all sounds the same, with only minor exceptions like Radiohead.
WHAT do you think, is their some stations that I could pickup on the internet that would satisfy my craving?
would you like to be able to get in you car and tune the radio to a station like the one I described?
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- 68 posts total
Rockinroni, yes, they s---. But I wonder if it's radio itself or the listener. I find, with age, one simply becomes more discriminating. So when one looks, a lot more appears to blow now than ever before. Perhaps the personal age of innocence has an expiry date. Of course once one knows where one's preferences lie, one looks less elsewhere, and when one does, then with... benign ambivalence(?). Slightly off-topic, but sometime ago I looked for some web radio stations to see what the hype was about. For classical I found a few were sometimes ok (kuni, wpr, wgbh, kccu, kosu, ksui,cbc r2, bbc r3). Most, I notice are college efforts. In the brief aside, I used this list, perhaps a usable site for finding interesting (web) radio for rock too. As bandwidth increases, one may hope that good stns in all areas will emerge with decent quality. For now, w/o question (since I don't have a tuner anyways), it's still LPs and CDs for me. |
I agree with most of you in this thread on most of the points raised. I grew up near Detroit in the 70's and early 80's. At its peak, Detroit had 4 AOR stations (FM, of course) and the pickin's were good for someone with that taste (for AOR, that is). By the time all that "new romantic" crap of the early 80's started, I had abandoned radio entirely. It wasn't until university that I rediscovered it on campus. As many of you have pointed out, college/university radio has always been a great source of "new music". Unfortunately, at that time, the university radio station had about a 5 watt transmitter and could only be heard on campus (heaven forbid you go across the street---you'll lose the signal for sure!) but I digress... Radio became so non-user friendly that I never even owned a tuner until just a few months ago. I am using it to educate myself in a new-found love of jazz. There is a pretty decent (member supported) jazz station in Toronto (near home) that I have been listening to a lot lately. I don't have a large (or small, for that matter) collection of jazz, especially old stuff, so this station is a boon to my burgeoning appetite for jazz. Maybe the reason that this station seems so good to me is that it is member-supported, like PBS. Or maybe it's that I can hear BBC world service news every now and again. |
Speaking of days gone by radio, does anyone remember Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford on KAAY-AM, Little Rock? He was a real ground-breaker in playing "subversive" music and had the balls to put on stuff that no one else would touch on commercial radio. And as might interest you, Ron, one of the "standards" for Cliff was Captain Beyond's "Dancing Madly Backwards". Oh, and I greatly miss album rock! |
The perception that today's radio stations are a sorry substitute for the broadcasting of yesteryear is probably correct. A number of factors have come into play: 1. fewer and fewer independent local and regional stations, as the broadcast giants consolidate their holdings; 2. use of "formulas" for broadcasting -- top 40, etc. -- that are pretty much the same across the country; 3. heavily compressed broadcast signals; 4. focus on profitability rather than quality; 5. the virtual demise of good classical and jazz programming. If this seems like a gloomy outlook, then consider what we have to look forward to following yesterday's ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (known inside the Washington, DC, beltway as a "captive agency"). The ruling by the FCC will permit a new wave of consolidation among newspaper, TV, and radio companies, which will place even more power in the hands of a few media giants. Newspapers will now be able to own TV and radio stations in the same city, and the broadcast networks will be able to own even more stations at the local and national level. Consider, for example, that the radio group called Clear Channel now owns more than 1200 radio stations in the U.S. -- let me say that again: 1200 stations, and growing!!! Or consider that Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns Fox News Channel and the Fox TV network, as well as 35 TV stations plus 20th Century Fox movie and TV studio. Nationwide, a single owner will be allowed to own stations that reach as much as 45% of TV households (up from 35%). So, if your perception is that radio stations are becoming more and more homogenous in their broadcast content, you have only more of the same to look forward to.... |
- 68 posts total