On Apr 5, 9:57 pm, David wrote:

That is ridiculous.

No. Most manufacturers choose to devote more attention to the FM
band. AM on modern commercial radios (and I'm talking the kind of set
you'd have at work or in the kitchen on top of the fridge, not a
dedicated SWL set like a Drake or Transoceanic) is practically DEAF!

Some of the name-brand radios are slightly better, but they're still
nowhere near what they were even 20 or 30 years ago.

Even my Kloss Tivoli Model 1 tuner (which is very great on FM) is
pretty much only good for local AM stations).

That makes no sense.

Listen to an AM station doing IBOC on a high-fidelity radio like a
Kloss Tivoli, Sangean WR-1 or even a Boston Acoustic's Recepter.

You'll hear the station sound hissy and you'll notice the audio "clip"
because of the sidebands (thanks to the wide-band tuner) and the
further compression of the analog portion of the signal. And that's
with the radio tuned correctly.

So basically your US$100.00 radio is left sounding worse than the
speaker on an answering machine.


Ever driven cross-country? At night?

A few times. I can drive from New York to Boston or even almost to
Chicago without changing the station. But how many people do you
think are going to put up with the swishy, wavy audio?

The other people that were in the car with me could not STAND it. One
even complained about it making her sea-sick. So I hunted for local
signals, mostly on FM to keep the passengers happy.

My 2007 SUV has a very high-performance AM radio and I can hear
stations 400+ miles away very nicely, thank-you.

Car radios usually have always had better front ends than most table
radios used in the house.

Stephanie Weil
New York City, USA

On 5 Apr 2007 20:22:32 -0700, "Stephanie Weil"
wrote:

On Apr 5, 9:57 pm, David wrote:

That is ridiculous.

No. Most manufacturers choose to devote more attention to the FM
band. AM on modern commercial radios (and I'm talking the kind of set
you'd have at work or in the kitchen on top of the fridge, not a
dedicated SWL set like a Drake or Transoceanic) is practically DEAF!

Some of the name-brand radios are slightly better, but they're still
nowhere near what they were even 20 or 30 years ago.

Even my Kloss Tivoli Model 1 tuner (which is very great on FM) is
pretty much only good for local AM stations).

That makes no sense.

Listen to an AM station doing IBOC on a high-fidelity radio like a
Kloss Tivoli, Sangean WR-1 or even a Boston Acoustic's Recepter.

You'll hear the station sound hissy and you'll notice the audio "clip"
because of the sidebands (thanks to the wide-band tuner) and the
further compression of the analog portion of the signal. And that's
with the radio tuned correctly.

So basically your US$100.00 radio is left sounding worse than the
speaker on an answering machine.


Ever driven cross-country? At night?

A few times. I can drive from New York to Boston or even almost to
Chicago without changing the station. But how many people do you
think are going to put up with the swishy, wavy audio?

The other people that were in the car with me could not STAND it. One
even complained about it making her sea-sick. So I hunted for local
signals, mostly on FM to keep the passengers happy.

My 2007 SUV has a very high-performance AM radio and I can hear
stations 400+ miles away very nicely, thank-you.

Car radios usually have always had better front ends than most table
radios used in the house.

Stephanie Weil
New York City, USA

You have a very Northeast-centric view of things. It is many hundreds
of miles between big cities out here and ''DX'' is very much a part of
the radio landscape. While my Tivoli Model One may have crappy AM, my
$30 Walkman is a DX screamer, except now the IBOC from 1140 in
Sacramento and 1160 in Salt Lake messes up the 1150 from Los Angeles.

On Apr 6, 9:10 am, David wrote:
my
$30 Walkman is a DX screamer, except now the IBOC from 1140 in
Sacramento and 1160 in Salt Lake messes up the 1150 from Los Angeles.

How old is your Walkman? The only Walkman I've ever used that had a
sensitive AM tuner was a 1980s model that allowed me to pick up all
the long-distance stations I could normally pick up with my electric
table radios.

While the more recent Walkmans, the tuners properly pick up all the
local stations, they're hardly DX machines. The same thing applies
for ghetto-blasters. The last ones of those with a GOOD sensitive AM
tuner were the ones that came out in the early-mid 1990s that usually
included a couple of SW bands.

There's less people listening to AM radio, so the manufacturers aren't
going to devote resources to a feature that's not going to help sell
the unit.

Stephanie Weil
New York City, USA