Do you still use your old radios

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Nolan Woodbury

After reading these last few posts, I'm more convinced than ever just how lucky we are here in the Phoenix area. Not only do we have 94.5 KOOL-FM (one of the oldest...'oldies' stations in the USA) and the 'Doo Wop Express' every Saturday night, but several other nice jazz and adult contemporary spots on the dial too. This doesn't include the awesome KCDX 103.1 (kcdx.com, give it a listen online) a true advert free, DJ free, 'underground' radio station that can be picked up in most of the Valley. While doing business in Germany last July, I'd log onto KCDX before going to sleep, just like I do at home. Yeah, the sound from my Dell laptop is a far cry from an H845...but it’s better than all night polka!

I used to think FM radio in Cleveland wasn't too diversified, until I got to thinking about the formats of the stations in the metropolitan area. The stations have just about every category of music covered, except easy listening (we lost the last easy-listening station, which was in a town some 50 miles east of Cleveland and 35 miles east of where I live today, in 1990 or thereabouts, when that station was changed to rock; it is now running a format it calls soft favorites, much the same as does a similar station in Cleveland, but it's not nearly the same as it was, and never will be again, I'm afraid).

I will have to log on to kcdx.com one of these days. One nice thing about the Internet is that stations which stream over the Web have a potentially worldwide audience (there is in effect no such thing as out-of-town FM anymore, or reception problems for that matter, if you have Internet access), so you need never be out of earshot of your favorite station (even if you live hundreds or thousands of miles away) if that station is online as well as on-air. The oldies station in Cleveland makes a big deal of streaming over the web; its identification announcement at or near the top of every hour even puts its Internet URL ahead of the station's own on-air call sign and location.

The only drawback to web streaming is that not all stations do it; the reason for that, of course, is that it costs any radio station a great deal of money to put its programming on line as well as on the air at the same time. The big stations operated by Clear Channel, Infinity, et al. can afford to do it, but many smaller FMs in small towns or smaller metropolitan areas cannot. There are some TV stations as well, mostly in very small markets out West (for example, at least one NBC affiliate in Wyoming isn't online yet, as I found out after looking it up on NBC's website, NBC.com), which do not yet have Internet web sites for the same reasons.