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Originally Posted by vintagecollect
AM Music stations are a thing in the past for here in Northern CA despite big company sponsors that used to support programming. Just political blog stations now.
Only use my 1930 Zenith to listen to news station. AM is a dead and obsolete entertainment medium out here. Sold many a good radio, just can't keep them all to listen to news for 1/2 an hour, sometimes during day. Someone must have their ears glued to listen for this crap, big corporations taking over programming.
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I know exactly what you mean. I live some 35 miles east of Cleveland; most of the city's AM stations are talk or news-talk these days. However, I did find one Canadian music station, AM 740 CHWO in Toronto, so music is not entirely a forgotten format on AM--you just have to know where to look. I am not familiar with what is on radio anywhere in California (never been there or anywhere west of Ohio in my life), so don't know what your AM situation is like except from what you tell us in your post. I would think, however, that there might be one or more music stations in small towns in your part of the state, even if most stations in San Francisco, et al. have switched to talk or news-talk. Don't know what you are using for an antenna on your 1930 Zenith, but if you have a reasonably good outdoor antenna hooked up you should be able to hear smaller stations in northern California or even Oregon. It wouldn't surprise me if Portland has one or more music stations; if you look around your AM dial at night, you might even hear the more powerful stations in Seattle or even north of the border in Vancouver, British Columbia. There are still many good music stations in Canada--CHWO 740 in Toronto, the one I listen to a lot, is one, but I doubt if it will reach the West Coast, as its signal pattern is configured to cover greater Toronto and much of the northeastern United States.
My point is that AM music radio is not dead yet, nor will it be any time soon. If worse comes to worst and you actually cannot find any music stations on your AM dial, look around on the Internet. There is a service called Live365 that plays 24-hour music, any kind of music you like, with no commercials if you subscribe to the paid version ($5.95 per month); there is a free ad-supported version of the same service. Log on to
www.live365.com to get more information and the free player you need to listen to their music. Also, if you have digital cable or satellite television service, you almost certainly will have access to several digital music channels. I have both Comcast digital cable and Live365 service, and like them both so well that I have all but abandoned standard radio (which isn't all that great here either, even on FM). The commercial-free nature of digital cable music and Live365 are well worth the monthly subscription fees. The Live365 player is free, and as I said, the basic service is free as well, so you really have nothing to lose.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot. Public radio stations often have very good music; the San Francisco area (and most major metropolitan areas) have at least one NPR affiliate. If your area's local NPR station is on AM or simulcasts AM and FM, you can tune in the AM station on your Zenith and it will very likely sound as good as FM--those old Zeniths have great sound (I have five such radios, one of which has a very good audio system for a table model, so I can vouch for the sound quality of the earlier Zeniths). If you want to hear the local NPR station on FM through your old Zenith AM radio, all you need is an FM-to-AM converter such as was used with car radios in the '60s and '70s. Set your Zenith to the output frequency of the adapter (usually 800-900 kHz or 1400-1500 kHz) and tune in your NPR station on the adapter. Just a thought.