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

On the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, an hour east of Portland OR, on top of a 2000' mountain so I can get a lot of stations pretty cleanly. I have my MD Etude on virtually all day every day, for background music while working. Stations are mostly acceptable quality-wise, but you don't listen to FM as a reference-quality source, but rather for the content. We have an excellent private listener-supported classical station, KBPS (www.allclassical.org, can get it off the web with RealPlayer, although I haven't tried it and have no great desire to). This is the first time in my life I've actually contributed to a listener-supported station, as I find the political slant of NPR and OPB to be insufferable. So I would heartily recommend a good tuner if you have any stations nearby that you would enjoy listening to. But "good" doesn't have to mean "expensive"; I previously had a Yamaha TX-950 (which can be had on the used market for around $200) which was surprisingly good in both reception and sound quality. There are many others out there in this price range that will extract most of the quality most FM stations have to offer. As far as going for bleeding-edge quality, if you live outside the major metropolitan areas in most cases it isn't going to be worth it. Maybe you should post your location and see if anyone pops up and offers to loan you their Day-Sequerra for a few days just to see.

I'm in the Washington DC area and have 4 great FM tuners (Mac MR-67; Magnum MD-102; Meridian 204; and Myryad MT-100). Unfortunately, there are hardly any great stations. I listen to WPFW for jazz and blues, WETA for NPR programs, and occasionally, when it comes in, WRNR near Annapolis MD for alternative and eclectic modern rock. I can rarely get WRNR though. Lots of multipath where I live. The rock stations are crap, I never tune them in. I wish I had more choices to feed my stable of tuners.

Oh, I live in the South Bay Area of California, Silicon Valley. Multipath heaven (hell?). Would be worth sifting through if 99% of it weren't compressed rock, oldies, and classic rock. There is only one classical music FM station that I know of but that really isn't my bag and they play mostly standard Mozart and Bach stuff, over and over again.

The lone jazz station that I can find (hard to believe in an area like this) is KCSM. It is, though, a great commercial free station. I understand there is another fine jazz station in the North Bay, but I can't pull it in.

In Princeton, New Jersey. Between NYC and Phili. Tons of great choices. Especially WXPN the Univ. of Penn. Home of the World Cafe'.

Richmond, VA. The same stuff they were playing ten years ago. OK, maybe not quite that bad but bad enough. That plus it's heavily commercialized. No tuner on the main rig. Receiver in the garage for background noise. I have a steering wheel tuner in the car & am constantly clicking through it. Turn it off a lot too.