Sy,
As long as we drive cars and listen to music that is not on disk or on a player we plug into the radio I don't think FM is going anywhere in our lifetime. Perhaps they will go to an all digital signal at some point like television, I'll wait and see if that ever happens.
Scott,
I actually live right under a radio tower on top of the Hollywood Hills. I am line of sight within 1oo yards or so. There are more antennae on that tower than you can believe and many microwave antennae also. To say I am in a bad location to get radio reception is putting it mildly. I've had to change my 75ohm coax on the television as it would pick up the RF and it does that on many other devices, 50K watts of radio station in my backyard basically! The Mac can actually pick out stations and sometimes some I have never even heard before as they are buried by adjacent stronger stations on most other tuners.
As long as we drive cars and listen to music that is not on disk or on a player we plug into the radio I don't think FM is going anywhere in our lifetime. Perhaps they will go to an all digital signal at some point like television, I'll wait and see if that ever happens.
Scott,
I actually live right under a radio tower on top of the Hollywood Hills. I am line of sight within 1oo yards or so. There are more antennae on that tower than you can believe and many microwave antennae also. To say I am in a bad location to get radio reception is putting it mildly. I've had to change my 75ohm coax on the television as it would pick up the RF and it does that on many other devices, 50K watts of radio station in my backyard basically! The Mac can actually pick out stations and sometimes some I have never even heard before as they are buried by adjacent stronger stations on most other tuners.
Here at my apartment I have 5 tuners to choose from. Three are solid state, and 1 is tube. I do own a Fisher vacuum tube tuner as well, but I have it loaned out. Only the Day-Sequerra and the Marantz 10 are really high fidelity.
I have a Sony digital tuner that I got for less than $100 and put perhaps twice as much into improving it, which would satisfy you too, Scott. Even stock, like who can hear a 2.2uf ceramic coupling cap anyway? You would find it quiet, accurate, etc., etc.
I found it wanting, after listening to it for about 1 year. It just does not compete with the Marantz or the Day Tuners. And guess who recommended it to me. Richard Sequerra! Some people are easier to please than others.
I have a Sony digital tuner that I got for less than $100 and put perhaps twice as much into improving it, which would satisfy you too, Scott. Even stock, like who can hear a 2.2uf ceramic coupling cap anyway? You would find it quiet, accurate, etc., etc.
I found it wanting, after listening to it for about 1 year. It just does not compete with the Marantz or the Day Tuners. And guess who recommended it to me. Richard Sequerra! Some people are easier to please than others.
Less than 5 years. Streaming has already overtaken it, it's a matter of turnover in the installed base.
Scott
JC is focused on hi-fi sound. This portable radio is a communication tool. There is nothing to compare.
But you can do that btn the Kaito and some vintage transistorized/IC portable world receivers that sell for ~$ 100-150 today (Grundig Satellit, Sony CF, CRF).
Compare the reception capabilities and the acoustic outcome. You will notice that there is a night and day difference, which would be much smaller if the Kaito (and it’s equals) had a descent loudspeaker.
There is hardly anything so enjoyable for me as listening to foreign stations in the night (MW/SWs)
Yes SY . They try to kill FM analog air transmition in Europe through regulations.
It is supposed that 2015 would be the deadline limit but I think they will prolong the operation for some 5-10 years (mostly thanks to car radio demand). In any case, technically good transmitions are very few these days. Worse, if you consider the program they transmit.
I know that in USA the situation regulation wise is a bit better. Technically and content wise, I had favorite experience with college and community stations in many of your cities.
In such difficult places, you have to consider a balloon right close to the antenna, otherwise the braid of the coaxial line works as an unintended antenna.
Next, you can add on the line some 1/4L stubs tuned to the transmitter frequencies you want to suppress. If you are interested I can provide details.
At your place the tubed McIntosh tuner found a good home!
George
George,
I would appreciate any help with this problem. I am not sure what you mean by a balloon or a stub so any details will help me a great deal as this radio station can bleed into so many devices in the house, they just can't handle rejecting that much signal strength. Let me put it this way, I can connect a pair of bare wires on the aluminum framed sliding glass windows and power up a set of Altec speakers and hear the station, basically like the fox hole radio I made as a kid! First time it happened by accident I didn't want to tell anyone I was hearing music on a speaker that was not connected to an amplifier, I thought I was loosing it until I saw the cut wires laying across the threshold of the door and realized what was going on!
ps. I do remember the Zenith sw radio my father had as a kid, lots of different wavelength to chose from and it was interesting to hear things from around the world. My sister has her ham radio license but I don't know if she ever uses that any more.
I would appreciate any help with this problem. I am not sure what you mean by a balloon or a stub so any details will help me a great deal as this radio station can bleed into so many devices in the house, they just can't handle rejecting that much signal strength. Let me put it this way, I can connect a pair of bare wires on the aluminum framed sliding glass windows and power up a set of Altec speakers and hear the station, basically like the fox hole radio I made as a kid! First time it happened by accident I didn't want to tell anyone I was hearing music on a speaker that was not connected to an amplifier, I thought I was loosing it until I saw the cut wires laying across the threshold of the door and realized what was going on!
ps. I do remember the Zenith sw radio my father had as a kid, lots of different wavelength to chose from and it was interesting to hear things from around the world. My sister has her ham radio license but I don't know if she ever uses that any more.
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Yes indeed, my favorite Austin stations stream, so I can still listen to them and their wonderful content, even from 1200 miles away.
Re the CRT. I used to own a Marantz with CRT. I used it mostly for multipath tuning. A meter would do just as well, i suppose but not if you own a crt Marantz which needs a crt replacemnt. At the moment, I have several brands of tuners... XM Radio to Kenwoods, to Yamaha (T2), rare Sony super tuner thing and a Magnun DynaLab. I listen to XM in the car mostly. And a little Sony HD Radio tuner for background classical for Lisa. For regular FM listening, I just cant get past all the adverts. I've been spoiled with channels with no or little adverts. probably why I dont bother to get around to doing alignments.... for what? To hear commercials every few minutes? I thought I would hook one of these up in Bangkok. I listened and there isnt anything I want to hear on FM there. It isnt FM quality/performance.... its fine. I'm not sure FM is dying. I would think the same of the LP. Both low on my Totom-Pole. Then streaming came along over Internet without commercials and HD music downloads of my choosing. Its a new direction that benefits/appeals to me more.
-RNM
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I think the US is still quite lucky - FM is not being actively killed off by the authorities. There was quite some debate (still ongoing?) in the UK about FM being replaced with a digital service called DAB. Lots of complaints in the hi-f press about the sound quality etc. IIRC there will be no more FM from 2016 - but please correct me if I am wrong.
Only a few stations in the UK really worry about quality - some of the BBC ones, Classic FM etc. The rest use huge amounts of compression (and especially on the announcers) and it sounds completely unrealistic - you can hear every intake of air they make between sentences. And of course, as always there are far too many smartarse hosts on air - it seems to be a UK affliction.
I've not tried listening to streaming stations for a while - do US stations compress the hell out of the material as well via the internet? Last time I listened to FM in the US was when I lived there nearly 30 years ago . . .
Only a few stations in the UK really worry about quality - some of the BBC ones, Classic FM etc. The rest use huge amounts of compression (and especially on the announcers) and it sounds completely unrealistic - you can hear every intake of air they make between sentences. And of course, as always there are far too many smartarse hosts on air - it seems to be a UK affliction.
I've not tried listening to streaming stations for a while - do US stations compress the hell out of the material as well via the internet? Last time I listened to FM in the US was when I lived there nearly 30 years ago . . .
FM in the UK was due to be killed off way back in the early 2000's Its still here and going strong. Analogue TV was due to be switched off in a similar way. That lingered until only two or three years back.
I've had a DAB tuner (Pure DRX701) since around 2004 ? and have been very pleased on the whole. Yes some stations are dire but they are talk or grot music ones.
When DAB was pushed at the beginning it was on the basis of sound quality, which MPEG 1 layer 2 could deliver at high bit rates. Like everything, more channels/choice were added and so the bit rates came down.
Radio 3 (classical based) is the highest bit rate, usually 192 kbps but in the mornings is often reduced as here to 160kbps to make room for other intermittent channels. The other is one of the grim ones.
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I was very amused, each time i went to US in the 70/80th, by the sound of the FM radios. Each one had a very special sound signature. Compressions (sometimes frequency based), echos or delays etc... Several of them added on the right an echo of the left channel and reciprocally. A very typical "West coast" sound.
Well, listening to the radio programs, cruising in a car on some LA highway under the sun, or, by night, in a desert, was a very special experience... and unforgettable pleasure (Oh this "Wolf man Jack" !).
Who cares about fidelity, listening to the radios ?
Nothing compare to the emotions I got, in colleges where I was a boarder, when we were listening to AM stations, the night in our beds, "Baby, you can drive my car" or "Paperback's writer" on some pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline.
And all those parasites and strange atmospheric effects on bandwidths was part of the mystery...
Well, listening to the radio programs, cruising in a car on some LA highway under the sun, or, by night, in a desert, was a very special experience... and unforgettable pleasure (Oh this "Wolf man Jack" !).
Who cares about fidelity, listening to the radios ?
Nothing compare to the emotions I got, in colleges where I was a boarder, when we were listening to AM stations, the night in our beds, "Baby, you can drive my car" or "Paperback's writer" on some pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline.
And all those parasites and strange atmospheric effects on bandwidths was part of the mystery...
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Oh, thanks a lot, vacuphile, i'm listening at it right now.
I fear "Emperor Rosko" will not be on board any more ;-)
Sad and true (true and sad).
Most of the people I see on the streets (all of the people below 40 y.o.) walk by wearing ‘in the ear’ headphones listening to music through their mobile phone device, and as I can tell from what I experience with my daughters and co, they listen to web radio at home too, again using their mobile phones but this time through the lousy in-built ‘speakers’.
The sadness is almost solely due to nostalgia though
Web radio is an excellent form of communication tool. Techno-economically, it can turn into the ‘ideal’ transmitter-receiver pair.
Steven, my apologies. “Baloon” should be ‘balun’ meaning ‘balanced to unbalanced converter’
Dipole antennas are balanced (with respect to ground) sources.
If the hot element in your antenna array is a straight half-wave dipole, it’s characteristic impedance is ~75 Ohm
If the hot element in your antenna array is a folded dipole, it’s characteristic impedance is ~300 Ohm
Next, feed lines can be balanced with respect to ground (twin lead line, usually of 300 Ohm impedance) or unbalanced (coaxial line, 50,75 or 100 Ohm impedance).
The optimum is to connect a folded dipole antenna (300 Ohm balanced) with a twin lead line (300 Ohm balanced) to the balanced 300 Ohm input of the tuner. Optimum impedance matching and maximum common mode rejection (no antenna action from the line) without using any balun and/or impedance transformer.
If you connect a folded dipole antenna (300 Ohm balanced) with a coaxial line (50,75 Ohm, unbalanced) to the unbalanced 75 Ohm input of the tuner, you will need a 4:1 balun at the antenna side [See slide 15 (preferred for it’s wide bandwidth) or slide 10 ]
If you connect a straight half-wave dipole antenna (75 Ohm balanced) with a coaxial line (50,75 Ohm, unbalanced) to the unbalanced 75 Ohm input of the tuner, you will need a 1:1 balun at the antenna side [ sleeve balun or slide 11 or slide 13 ]
Ref slide no:
http://www.dusoft.cz/PMR/Moxon/baluns.ppt
Now for the 1/4L stub.
It’s a simple and effective way to build a notch filter. See this link (page 4) http://www.wrightsaerials.tv/reference/resources/vhf-interference.pdf
You can attach more than one 1/4L stubs on the feed line, each one tuned to a different frequency.
1/4L stub attenuation spreads over to nearby channels. If your needs call for a sharper notch, then you may have to think of building or buying one or more coaxial resonators.
Each of them if connected in series (construction incorporates two coupling loops) to the line act as a band pass filter. If it connected in parallel (construction incorporates one coupling loop), it acts as a band reject (notch) filter.
Fr and Q can be adjustable and resonators can be cascaded to increase the attenuation.
http://www.amalgamate2000.com/radio-hobbies/radio/coaxial_resonators.htm
Coaxial Tank V.H.F. Filter Designer
All the above can be applied to TV or FM aerials.
Your sister can supply you with the ARRL (the older the better) manual, you can find all that you need there.
Well, 50kW at 100yards away can mean a field strength of anything btn 200mV/m and 20V/m depending on the directivity of the XT antenna and the location of your house wrt the axis of radiation. I would say that the minimum bet is ~ 2V/m.
You can connect a wire loop antenna to a rect diode and a smoothing capacitor for to lit a string of Christmas leds.
The Mac has two cascaded tracking band pass filters right at the antenna input and one after the 1st RF stage.
George
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I did, and I didn't use the internal speaker. It was not night and day even with NPR, IMHO obviously.
You have to be kidding, lots of trash talk is de rigueur here usually with a deep voiced woman side kick laughing out loud constantly.
As I said before, different tuners have different design approaches, even if they are in the same price range.
The Marantz 10 series, I would presume, was designed for maximum fidelity when the FM station would broadcast it. I suspect the Mac tuner was optimized for difficult conditions. Both are OK approaches.
However, I must admit that Richard Sequerra and I are both 'fossils' when it comes to today's program presentation. The old analog transmissions, once done with vacuum tubes everywhere in the chain, really did sound good. Today, about the best you can get is a CD quality sound from FM transmission. Good, but not as good as all analog (in my opinion).
I never had gotten complete audio satisfaction from the digital transmissions used today. Perhaps, I was spoiled in the '60's, but for the last 45 years, when I first heard my first 'quality' digital attempt, I have never found complete satisfaction in either IC's or digital based transmissions.
However, that is my problem, apparently not one that people here generally have. This may be a fundamental reason why we disagree so often here.
The Marantz 10 series, I would presume, was designed for maximum fidelity when the FM station would broadcast it. I suspect the Mac tuner was optimized for difficult conditions. Both are OK approaches.
However, I must admit that Richard Sequerra and I are both 'fossils' when it comes to today's program presentation. The old analog transmissions, once done with vacuum tubes everywhere in the chain, really did sound good. Today, about the best you can get is a CD quality sound from FM transmission. Good, but not as good as all analog (in my opinion).
I never had gotten complete audio satisfaction from the digital transmissions used today. Perhaps, I was spoiled in the '60's, but for the last 45 years, when I first heard my first 'quality' digital attempt, I have never found complete satisfaction in either IC's or digital based transmissions.
However, that is my problem, apparently not one that people here generally have. This may be a fundamental reason why we disagree so often here.
Locally, we've had many live FM broadcasts of classical and folk music. With a good FM tuner they sound great.
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