On Wed, 9 Jul 2008 15:25:01 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):
wrote in message
http://theaudiocritic.com/blog/
H"D Radio FM/AM Digital Tuner
Sony XDR-F1HD
This is a $100 (thats no typo) tuner that blows away
the classic super tuners of McIntosh, Marantz,
Sequerra, Accuphase, etc., according to FM experts who
know more than I do."
He referes to this in depth technical review:
http://ham-radio.com/k6sti/xdr-f1hd.htm
It had to happen - the complex, expensive analog filters in their IF strips
that made the classic high performance FM tuners what they were, get
replaced by a DSP that costs a few bucks.
Now, if there was only any reason to bother to listen to FM, except maybe in
my car. :-(
BTW car radios are the intended major market for this technology.
So true. It wasn't always that way, though. When I was a teen (early 1960's)
living near Washington DC, stereo FM had just come in. In those days, there
were only a handful of FM stations in that market and they were w-i-d-e-l-y
spaced on the dial so nobody was using compression and nobody cared if the
stations overmodulated a bit, so no one used limiters either. The two college
stations, one belonging to American University (WAMU) and the other belonging
to George Washington University (WRGW), followed the live music concert scene
in DC. On any given summer Friday or Saturday night, the National Symphony or
one of the President's armed forces bands (Army, Navy, Air-Force, Marines)
would be playing at the Watergate down by the C&O canal (Watergate had a
different connotation then) in front of the Lincoln Memorial. People would
pull-up alongside the floating bandshell in their boats, or sit on the steps
leading down to the river or just spread-out blankets on the grass and
listen. Couldn't attend? Tune in on FM and hear it live (complete with the
sound of airplanes from National Airport taking-off and landing overhead). It
was marvelous. People today have no idea how good live FM could be in the
early days. It was like having a good pair of Neummann U87 microphones
running from the Watergate to your stereo system! In the winter, most of
these concerts moved indoors to the State Department Auditorium and were
broadcast from there which was even better because of the hall acoustics (and
no airliners).
If you'd like to get an idea what the Watergate concerts were like in those
days, watch the beginning of a movie with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren called
"Houseboat." It sort of begins at a Watergate concert where Sophia's
character's father is a visiting Italian symphony conductor.
Then of course there was the WQXR "network" which, in the early 1960's
relayed (via the receive-and-rebroadcast method) programming from WQXR in New
York City to a chain of stations going north into New England and south to
DC. It was a little noisier than the local live broadcasts. The 'QXR
affiliate in DC, was (IIRC) WMAL-FM and their chief engineer told me once
(because I called and asked) that they received their feed by rebroadcasting
the signal they picked-up using a high-gain single-frequency yagi antenna
from the Philadelphia affiliate. So what we got was an FM signal that was
captured by the Philly station off the air from WQXR New York, and then they
rebroadcasted it and WMAL picked up that rebroadcast and then rebroadcasted
it themselves, so there were TWO FM outlets between my FM tuner and the
originating FM station in NYC. No matter. What we got (while it lasted) was
live broadcasts of the NY Philharmonic from Lincoln Center, concerts from
Carnegie Hall, and smaller ensembles directly from WQXR's studios. It was
glorious!
I really miss those live stereo FM broadcasts and I was saddened to see, the
last time I was in DC, that the powers-that-be had allowed the band-shell
barge at the Watergate to sink. Youngsters today wonder why we old farts
think that the world has gone downhill since our youth. Well, its because it
has!