Anybody Feel Sad That FM/AM Radio May Die Out

I love the radio in my wagon, I still have lots of broadcasts on AM and FM, plus I can probably keep my cassette deck working forever (I rebuild antique radios) and due to the huge multitude of cassettes made and the fact they still make blanks I can probably count on my tape deck being an option for me forever, but as with many other things of a vintage nature AM/FM is still very useful.

I have several 60s and 70s console floor radios and TVs that I rebuilt and FM is actually beautiful sounding. I don't understand how come people can hear it, but XM radio is too compressed, some stations are running at like 96 when 128 compression is basically the standard to the average ear for good quality.

every radio I have sounds great, however in the last 4 cars ive had they lump the shittiest am/fm radio in the unit which sounds horrid.

This digital tech is great, but all of these younger generations seem to be killing it, too many people on youtube, and not just for music, kids actually watch this for entertainment, I thought reality shows were bad, youtube is SO much worse.

I guess I am getting old even though I don't feel like it, I miss the analog TV transmission, little bit of a weak signal and just a touch of static instead of complete loss of datastream in and out.

Guess I will have to go to my grave with my VHS , Cassettes, the good entertainment I have downloaded, 8-tracks, LP's etc

just a rant about how these younger kids seem to be ruining music and television and causing a paradigm shift from good music and TV to total crap, id rather watch an inde scifi or horror flick on Netflix any day over this new youtube crap, reality tv, and even the gazillion crappy comic book hero movies with no substance like 80s action movies.

my last will and testament, when I die load up all my media in my wagon and bury me in container that will be sealed forever, maybe some explorers millions of years after life has died out on this planet will dig me up and realize that the human race actually had some cool things at one time haha

 

These young Whippersnappers making absolute fools of themselves on social media aren't even thinking ahead enough to realize that once something's seen, it cannot get unseen. Not only are their bosses (concerning the ones who are even in a traditional employment situation) have access to watch them, their future grandkids will witness their utter foolishness also, if these fools even will be capable of finding a partner for having their children. I myself don't have television, anymore. It isn't becdause of me getting modern. It's just that there's nothing left on television that I could miss and what's in there isn't worth watching, anyway.
Technically, the digitalizing of what we get to hear is the next step downward. I'm old enough to remember when radio became transistorized. That was the first step towards going from the highest quality natural sound which cathode ray tubes were capable of providing, replacing those troublesome tubes with a lower quality artificial sound produced by reliable transistors

 

Yes. Norfolk lost its last "oldies station" about 5-6 years ago. Now it is 90's and up music...meaning I listen to CD's or my wife's Satellite 50's-70's music. My older cars only have the radio, and one wonders what is the point in getting it to work anymore? I don't do long road trips in them so I just leave the radio off.

 

-Believe the real issue for both audio and video has become portablilty. Younger people value the availibility of the media over all else. Our generation searched for the best sounding speakers and now buys the largest tv screens we can afford. The. millenials and x'ers listen and watch on their phones. They are always out because many cannot afford a decent house and their urban apartments are closets. And as far as driving goes - forget it. I tried to explain double clutching at a car show once to a 20 something. No comprehension at all.

 

I had to teach my kids how to use a dial phone, while they were already using modern pushbutton types. What's really sad are trades which are either going extinct or have already become so. The first to come to mind is leading sheetmetal, instead of using Bondo. What will future archeologists have to re-discover and re-invent?
Luckilly, over here, learning cathode ray tube technology is still part of audio-visual electronics trademanship. I was relieved, when a student of such fetched an old combination recordplayer and radio cabinet of which I didn't want it to end up at a landfill. He was telling me that there's no better sound than that which is emitted from tube radios. Even the best guitar amplifiers still use tubes, because transistors not only still underperform tube units. Another student who came over for my vintage speakers I was giving away told me that rebuilding an entire tube radio unit runs into the hunderds, partly because the components needed shouldn't be the inferior ones you get from Third World countries like China. I remember him saying that Japanese parts are still available and up there with the best

 

I stopped listening to radio when the last Oldies station in my market died over a decade ago. It's been MP3s on my phone played through my car stereo since then. After all, both cars and music peaked between 1956 and 1972.

 

I only listen to talk radio.

 

I agree about trades going away. I can rebuild a television or radio from the 30s all the way to the 90s, and even after that, but the computerized boards can no longer be repaired and are not worth buying as they charge as much usually as the TV is worth when it fails.

Recently completely restored a 1981 sears dial TV, it had the straight vertical line issue, I spent maybe 30 bucks and replaced EVERY single capacitor in it, the tube was in perfect condition and I swear it could be boxed up and sold new if it was 81 again lol.

Couldn't sell the TV if I wanted to, but the NES works perfect on it

 

I fixed our washmachine electronics, following a Youtube how-to video. It had spinning issues which didn't take long for the machine to not turn the drum any longer. It was the capacitor or capacitors which, after about 20 years, start losing their electrolyte through evaporation which were at fault. A new circuit board costed over 370€ and the manufaturer even offered to buy the old one back for 75€. Obviously, they would have rebuilt it exactly how I would have had. Testing the circuit board looked like Frankenstein's laboratory. What one had to do was to heat up the chip with a hair dryer. If the drum then started to turn, it was the capacitor/s at fault. Both costed only 1.15€ together. The savings alone made it all worth it. It was still fun work, despite

 

Yep when in doubt change capacitors and now since you have to order them from digikey etc might as well get them all. I wont even power on anything before the mid 70s before complete replacement to begin with

 

I remember when those first hand held transistor radios came out. In fact, I remember when black and white TV became a common household item, back in the 50's. Everytime a V-8 Ford drove down the street, the screen got lines in it and the picture went off!

Way back in the cave man days, the local radio stations in Illinois played real country music and real rock and roll. I was a trucker so often listened to WMAQ Chicago for music, news, and fun chatter. All of the local low powered stations went off air in a few miles. Chicago, The Grand Ole Opree, and Del Rio, Texas AM could be heard all over the midwest.
It wasn't long before TALK RADIO replaced everything else. The junk they talked about never did interest me. So I mostly stuck to my CB radio and made my own talk. That's where "Model T" was created.

Fast forward.......... Bought my 2014 car one year old in 2015. Turned the radio on once to listen to it work for a few minutes. Turned it off. That was July 2015.
We lived in NW Florida, deep in the woods, west of Gainesville. There was a tiny local radio station around 8 miles from the house that played early country and rock and roll. Loved that radio station. It was AM or FM. All of the small radio stations got bought up by the biggies in Gainesville, Fl. No more early country or early rock n roll. Just modern crap music.

Somewhere around 2000, digital TV replaced over the air waves. Until then, my large antenna on a rotor got enough channels and old reruns that we were happy on a windy cold evening. After digital signals, we went without TV until we moved back to Illinois in mid 2016. We'd had one of those fancy new monster 60" consol TV sets that was as large as a VW Beetle. With a VCR and DVD player, we still watched an occasional movie on that 60" TV set. But we realized that we didn't need TV. As kids, we survived with out one!

My dad loved to tinker on old radios and TV sets. He had a big old consol radio looking thing with around a 3" square TV screen. He also had a TV set with a round screen, sorta like looking at a washing machine with people inside it! Dad bought an old tube tester. He'd rebuild junk TV's or repair someone's TV for a few dollars. At least we sometimes had a TV to watch back in the 50's.

My wife and I still watch very little TV. We spent much of our spare time playing with old cars in our garage or RV camping. Of course, back then campers didn't have electricity. Our kids and us survived without TV, radio, or a telephone for weeks at a time. Now even preschoolers have a Smartphone glued to their face.

I recently gave one of my son's a perfectly good 46" flat screen TV just so I could put a 58" TV above the fake fireplace on the wall. My excuse was because it is 50" wide like the media center/fireplace.
It's also a Smart TV. Actually it's a big flat cell phone-computer hanging on the wall! We just had to get cable so I could play with my computer. I have one of those, almost rare, tower set ups with a curvy monitor. It's no better than a flat monitor but paying over $300 for it seemed like the right thing to do!

We now have a zillion channels with 99% useless things to watch, plus NetFlix, Rocu, and other things that confuse me. Son also added a memory stick thing with more old movies and TV shows than we'll ever be able to watch if we had the TV on 24 hours a day. I can tell the TV to change channels, just like I used to tell the kids and dad told us kids, years ago.

But this is supposed to be about good sound. When I bought the fancy new 58" TV, which is small compared to what our kids and friends have, I also bought a sound bar with a big bass because all reviews said voices can be heard better. Being old, I need better sounding voices. Well that fancy new soundbar made that Smart TV sound like a large movie theater. We could hear lightning, thunder, horses hooves, gun shots, and booming bass like a low rider at high noon! But all of that extra back ground noise that shook the floor and caused my beer to spill on the lamp table, also made human voices even more difficult to hear. Sure glad my son hadn't screwed that sound bar to the wall yet! Took it back to Wally World and these new built in TV speakers are sort of clearer than the older new TV.

I miss real AM/FM. I miss 78rpm records. I miss drive-in movies, and we've actually been to the cornfield where rock-N-roll died. Yes, we've been to Memphis to visit Elvis. He'd already left the building.

 

Looks like you stumbled on an idea for inventing an oscillosope. Did you get 8 lines?

 

Now that I think of it, the manufacturer who offered to buy my old circuit board vintage 1987 was confident that it wouldn't fry. I was told that having faulty electronic bits on a board would have the domino effect of taking the rest of the bits down with it, if the faulty one wasn't replaced in time.
Preaching to the choir, the programmable chip executes a board's death sentence, if it goes bad. The chip alone costs no more than a couple dimes to manufacture. But it's programming it that makes the company programming it a monopoly able to grab deep into one's wallet

 

Yeah, I think we all thought FM radio would last forever.

I'm thankful though, that I grew up in the beginning of the FM Rock era, listening to some GREAT FM DJ's in the L.A. area. And I'm STILL listening to one of them who's on Sat radio now - Jim Ladd..... Was listening to him way back in 1971. He started young - only 21 when he got his first radio DJ job in 1969 - the year i graduated H.S.

 

Yeah, most of the Seattle DJ's I grew up with are all retired or moved on. Gary 'Lock-Jock' Lockwood, Charlie Brown, and a host of others. About the oldest on Seattle FM now is Gary Crow and Steve Slayton.