Quote:
Originally Posted by jr_tech
The critical thing here is listening distance relative to the speaker spacing... this little Sangean, which has about 8" speaker spacing, placed on my desk where I am working 2 to 3 feet away, produces a quite pleasing stereo image. I would not recommend it as a room-filling stereo, but for close listening, it is quite nice.
http://www.universal-radio.com/catal...alty/0068.html
By the way, it is a HOT radio for FM dx, that far outperforms (in sensitivity and selectivity) every vintage Zenith that I have ever owned, including a TO 3000 and Y-832 
jr |
Your hearing is probably normal in both ears. I am almost deaf in my right ear so I cannot hear stereo properly, on my stereo system or on the stereo (!) audio system of my flat-screen TV. This means stereo is all but useless to me.
As to FM DX, you are probably surrounded by mountains. The only "FM DX" you probably get is within the state you live in, unless you have an FM antenna mounted ridiculously high.
Here in northeastern Ohio, I have yet to hear any FM stations from California or anywhere hundreds of miles away. The best "FM DX" I have ever had was in the summer of 1970, when a local FM station was knocked off the air in a thunderstorm. The station I heard while the local one was silent was in West Palm Beach, Florida on 107.9 MHz. I had a cheap stereo FM portable radio at the time with a telescoping antenna, nothing more. Once the local station was back on the air I never again heard that station, or any other FM stations from Florida--or anyplace else hundreds of miles south, east or west of where I live.
The only FM DX I get here, as a rule, is from Detroit, southwestern Ontario, Canada, Erie, Pennsylvania and Youngstown, Ohio. I am within one mile of the south shore of Lake Erie, so I can get the Detroit stations, as well as the others I mentioned, quite well in the summer on any of my Zenith radios.
How can a radio such as your "Sangean" portable be better from an FM selectivity and sensitivity standpoint than any 50+-year-old Zenith radio?
Your set must have an FM section hotter than a firecracker if it can outperform most older tube-powered radios.
Most of today's FM radios are nowhere near that sensitive or selective. The digital FM tuner in my bookshelf stereo system, for example, is almost useless in my area, which is about 40 miles from Cleveland's FM stations. I am sure it would work well in the Cleveland suburb I moved here from 16 years ago, but in a semi-fringe area such as the small east-central Lake County, Ohio town I live in today, it doesn't work well at all. I cannot listen to the local NPR station, for example, when my computer is on due to the CPU hash, and stereo FM reception is iffy at best on some stations; therefore, I listen mostly to my own CDs, cassettes and audio files stored on my computer for music, having almost completely abandoned FM radio.
I realize a better antenna would solve the reception problems I have here, but since I live in an apartment building with lease restrictions forbidding outdoor television or FM antennas (every tenant in this building, including myself, has cable or satellite for TV and probably uses short indoor antennas for FM, no antennas), such antennas are out of the question.