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

I live near Kalamazoo, MI. We do have a few Classical stations, a College station that plays NPR, the rest, as far as know, are your typical music we all have, yes, compressed. One station that I like, they play Easy Listening music, plays Smooth Jazz after 8 pm every night and all day Sunday until 6 pm.

I purchased a Fanfare FT-1A in 2000; I hadn't used a tuner in a decade or so. I never regretted that purchase as I found I used my system much more and enjoy using a tuner a lot more than I expected.

Early last year I sold the Fanfare and purchased a Yamaha T2 and feel this has been one of my better purchases. I believe the Yamaha outperforms the Fanfare and I don't have nearly as much invested into it.

I enjoy using a tuner a lot.

I live in the Washington DC/Baltimore area and I'll just add to Sarah's good list.... WGMS (commercial classical); and WJHU and WBJC, the two public stations in Baltimore.
I agree the rock stations suck, but the Jazz, Classical and lots of PBS/NPR stations in the area make it worth having a good tuner.

I have a modified Kenwood KT-8300 and a stock Kenwood KT-6500 at home; and an Onkyo Integra T-4087 in my office.

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.

I live in Tualatin, Oregon - which is a suburb just south of Portland. And I might add, that I deffinately agree with many of Karls remarks above.
Uncompressed FM stations in the Portland/Vancouver,WA market are few and far between. As mentioned, KBPS-FM - our local classical station is quite good - and I'm pleased to have a nice McIntosh MR-73 tuner that picks up the station with great clarity. I've also maintained a membership with this fine public supported station for several years.
Though the local PBS station KOPB-FM does not compress their broadcast signal - they stopped broadcasting classical music in favor of a "talk" format - and their views are just way too P.C. for me to listen to for any length of time.
For jazz lovers - there is KMHD-FM which is a nice change of pace at times; as well as a couple of college radio stations. But most of the kids are into hip-hop and other types of music I really don't much care for - so I
rarely listen to the college stations.
As for the rest of the FM stations in Portland - the vast majority are run by outfits like Infinity and Clear Channel. And not only are all the play lists totally predictable - they are quite boring.
If it were not for the KBPS and KMHD, I suspect I would listen to little radio other than talk programs which are mostly on AM.

BTW the station I listen to is WIDR, the Western Michigan University college station and the sound quality is good on my Rotel tuner but still down a notch from my Sony 9000 DVD player.

radio is hard to beat for new music and WIDR is supposed to be one of the best in the nation.