Kill Your Tuner

It seems that there are still some people listening to FM radio as a viable music source. Have you listened to FM radio recently? In the words of my first boss, " Oy". It's not that the content sucks, which it does at unspeakable levels of suckiness, it's that the questionable sound surpasses the threshold of what is considered listenable.

For some inexplicable reason, the places where you are the most likely to hear FM radio blaring is on residential construction sites and in warehouses. The shippers in these warehouses seem to rule the roost as they determine the loudness level and radio station. It might even be a union regulation that said aural assault be blaring from some shitty portable radio that was probably thrown in the trash in the 80's and subsequently rescued. Often these plastic distortion boxes are duct taped to a work bench or an overhanging pipe.

On construction sites or home renovations the sonic assault weapon of choice is one those radios made by power tool companies are are intentionally made to resemble a cordless drill. It is not a coincidence that they kinda sound like a drill.

It must also be a union regulation that all radios on the job site must each be tuned to a different station and blared at maximum levels until the lithium ion battery pack dies. The ensuing cacophony is guaranteed to eliminate most traces of actual craftsmanship. I'm not saying that carpenters and warehousemen are hosers, but they do seem to have an unnatural affinity for crappy classic rock and obnoxious commercials.

Upon its inception, radio showed great promise. It irreversibly changed society on a profound level. Without going all Wikipedia on you, suffice it to say that radio was the catalyst of the electronics industry and gave rise to the great inventions of the twentieth century such as television, stereos, computers and those pocket calculators that spell "boobs" when you turn them upside down.

More specifically, the invention of the vacuum tube or valves as they are called in England was a catalyst that preceded radio. As any metal head worth his salt and the beer stains on his Marshall can attest,;tubes have always rocked and they still do. If it wasn't for tubes and radio there would be no basement-wanking freakos hatching conspiracy theories on the internet, no seven year olds blowing up entire armies of their X-box, no mindless zombie-retards walking into you at full force as they text and walk and no electronic toasters setting your house on fire.

Commercial radio got its start long ago. The first commercial radio station was start by Gugliemo Marconi himself in 1919 in Montreal, Quebec of all places. Call letters XWA gave way to CFCF and survived until around 2010.

The advent of stereo FM broadcasts in the early sixties opened up new vistas and made FM radio a viable high resolution music source. To this day, a live FM broadcast has the potential of being an incredible sounding music source. However, when is the last time anyone's ever heard a live radio broadcast of a band? Probably around the same time that the Beverly Hillbillies was still being broadcast in black and white.

Like most things, radio got ugly in the Seventies. Real ugly. Radio stations began to be more regulated in regards to their content and playlists. Commercials became pervasive as well, because that was the only source of revenue. In Canada the CRTC, in its infinite wisdom, imposed CanCon laws on all radio stations ( except specialty or historical programming). For my friends in other countries who are not familiar, CanCon is an abbreviation for Canadian content regulations which stipulate that 30% of the music being aired must be Canadian. So now, even if your band sucked, you might get airplay simply due to the fact that you were a Canuck. Don't get me wrong, I am proud to be a Canadian. I love maple syrup, moose, excessive taxes, Tim Horton's donuts and even our shitty Trans Canada highway. However our musical legacy to the world has not always been legendary. Our gift to the world included the likes of Celine Dion and Justin Bieber. You're welcome, Las Vegas.

Regulatory bodies also began to put limitations on the technical aspects of broadcasting such as overall volume level, wattage output and equalization. The main culprit however, was the radio stations themselves. Everyone wanted to be loudest, but were limited by the constraints of technical requirements. The solution was to route the signal through a series of limiters and compressors. This would limit the dynamic range dramatically, but make it seem louder. Dynamic range is the difference between the quietest passage and the loudest in a piece of music.

The ability of an audio system to reproduce this accurately is difference between a mediocre stereo and a truly stellar audio system, this is what gives life to music. Radio dispensed of this notion and to this day compress the hell out of their signals. Engineers would mess around with this, but the desired effect was specially geared to crappy radios and car stereos. It was shitty, but was freakin' loud ! Engineers would also mess around with the speed of records and later CD's. A song played at 3 or 4 % faster not only made it sound more rockin' than it actually was, but it had an added benefit of saving time, time that could be used for squeezing in more commercials.

In all fairness, radio stations all limited to the amount of advertising that they can broadcast for every hour on the air, so all that extra time could be used for various filler such as mindless banter from inane radio hosts.

This another staple that made radio un-listenable for the most part; radio dj's yammering about nothing or more insidious; the morning wake up crew. Some people seem to enjoy this raucous innuendo-laced banter on their morning commute in the confines of their car.

It all seems geared towards the lowest common denominator as are the playlists. Like many things , radio has grown more and more homogenized and more often than not, playlists are stored on hard drives and randomly selected by computers relying on statistics and demographics. The human element has become several steps removed. unless of course you enjoy hearing the same few hundred classic rock tunes over and over again ( wasn't that used as a form of torture in some war somewhere?).

Back in the early 90's, for some inexplicable reason, I was imbued with a slight amount of altruism. I wanted to spread the word about Rockabilly and roots of music. I somehow managed to convince the local College radio station to give me my very own weekly radio show.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I soon came to dislike it. The radio station seemed under- funded and had pretty run down equipment. I had to balance the tonearms on the turntables before every show and even then I shuddered that at the damage that I was inflicting on my records ( yes still using vinyl back then). Being a non-profit community station, there were fewer restrictions imposed upon me and I was doing a historical show ( or whatever the designation was)  but I still had to bring my own records, play some public service announcements, write all this down as I went along, and refrain from cursing ( still a thing on commercial radio).

The station was run by humorless, sniveling proto-hipsters in tattered sweaters and they didn't take too kindly to my on-air antics which included howling and making fun of the station's broken down equipment. ( I guess hipsters haven't evolved all that much). After about a year , I realised that I didn't like radio, I didn't like waking up at 8 on Sunday mornings to do the show and I didn't like getting heat from leftoid assholes. Also I was doing it for free, which really started to grate on me.

I'm not sure what the future holds for radio, it seems to me that its days might be numbered. A tuner in a high end system is truly a waste of money. Until recently companies like Linn and Magnum Dynalab were making and selling hellishly expensive tuners. Back in the day, Linn made a tuner called the Kremlin. They claimed it was so powerful that it could receive signals from Moscow all the way to Glasgow ( and it cost 5 freakin thousand dollars at the time ). Powerful may be a good thing, but the end result still sounded terrible, even when the commies couldn't stop pirate radio stations from broadcasting freaked-out jazz from the back of some very ugly Russian van.

I had a Linn tuner for many years, and I barely, read, never, used it. Radio stations are uncommonly sucky here and when I did try playing that tuner through my system it sounded like I had run the wires through a cardboard box. A large cardboard box. Filled with dog turds. I recently sold it on craigslist for 60 bucks, That was a bit of a shame, because the stupid thing retailed for $1500 back in the day, but 60 bones it what it was worth. I probably should have stripped the guts and made a nice ashtray out of it.

As I look at the I-tunes that came with my Mac, there are quite literally hundreds of internet radio stations that are available for streaming 24 hours a day. There are very few commercials and one can listen to any style of music imaginable form Bulgarian Oi music, hippie drum circles with atonal didgeridoos, free-style be-bop jazz that would scare dogs or Norwegian Black Death metal. Take your pick. Coupled with even a decent quality USB DAC ( digital to analog converter, more on this in a future post) the sound quality easily trumps even the most expensive analog tuners. Even at low bitrates like 128 kbps, the sound easily surpasses anything that was previously available on the market. There are now a few high resolution streaming radio stations available and, as computers get faster and have more RAM for relatively cheap, streaming these stations will be quite simple.

There are very few compelling arguments that are relevant to commercial radio and analog broadcasts. Unless you like shitty pop music, inane radio hosts, discount furniture commercials, entering futile contests or the pseudo-intellectuals on the CBC and their pretentious ramblings, kill your tuner right now.