Uh, that "downhill slide" began in the late-'70s.

I can totally see that. It's closely related to the reason why we should use Quad RG-6 instead of foil and braid: so someone else cannot come along and say "oh, so they chose not to install the good stuff!"

Most all our customers stream FM.

Our customers usually can't pick up but 2 or 3 radio stations. And they are rarely the same 3 from house to house. Most get the local station that is bad modern country, then a couple stations in the 80's frequencies, usually one being NPR and the other a religious station. So if they want terrestrial radio, we install Sonos and let them stream it. Radio is dead.

AM/FM is on the same playing field as off air tuners in TV's.
Most don't have a use for it.

The ones that do would be pretty upset if the one thing they expected wasn't included after a lifetime of it being a given.

last week I was in a pawn shop that a friend of mine owns. As I was browsing through his inventory I found not one, but two digital converter boxes that he had bought and was trying to sell. I felt so bad for him, I couldn't even bust his balls over them, because they were recent buys. He didn't have them at least a month before.

What do you mean?

There are plenty of people with 15+ year old TV's wanting OTA TV ;-)

Well.....I'll bet there's at least one......somewhere......Maybe.....too bad they won't want to pay anything for it.

And considering where I am, they might get 3 FM stations, they might also get 1 OTA TV station.

So given that one customer, reduced by the fraction of the Appalachian mountain range, it might sell by the time analog is completely cut off by the FCC

I know of someone who could have used it at their guest house, but I recently replaced his mom's TV and that one will be going up there in the near future. If they find a use for the old TV, I'll let you know.

Maybe im the minority here but I actually rather dislike Pandora and the streaming services (other for music that I like and want to listen to) I also cannot stand Satellite Radio

I still very much listen to the radio ALL THE TIME. its how I discover new music.

My most used app on sonos is TuneIN and spotify. nothing else.

I Am actually looking at picking up a used Halo T3 tuner for my 2ch setup because of the quality of streaming radio is super poor. I regularly use the FM tuner in my Marantz AV7701

Personally I would be very sad if manufactures started removing radio's from equipment

It's time for you to start embracing new technology you old fart

I am with you 100% (as evidenced by my earlier post) except that Pandora is a phenomenal way to discover new music. I never like or dislike anything and just let it roll.

The neighbors gave me funny looks when I was installing "that old fashioned antenna" that spins.

OTA radio will not go away as long as there is cars and a need for emergency broadcasts.

I don't know where you are, but here, commercial radio has sucked for decades. The only two stations that play anything that's new are one college station and another one that was basically a gift to the City of Milwaukee from Peter Buffet (Warren's son, who's a musician/composer and lived here), Joe Puerta (played Bass and Guitar in Ambrosia, Bruce Hornsby & The Range, etc, is a producer and also owns a recording studio here) and a few others. Both stream, so it's convenient, but as usual, it's not high bit-rate and the sound sucks. I yanked the plug on XM after they merged with Sirius because they removed the station I listened to the most and because the Sirius sound is terrible.

Another problem with radio had to do with VTuner- Denon's receivers didn't have the ability to turn that off and when the server had problems, it sounded like a skipping CD. Nobody, including Jeff Cowan (Denon) had a good answer until the next year's models came out and they problem was "fixed".

I have had some great old tuners, but the separate one I have now isn't particularly good and it would work better if it was farther from the antenna farm about 1/2 mile from my house. I'm planning to buy a Parasound preamp and power amp but I haven't decided what to do about radio, if anything. I don't need a sensitive tuner, I need a selective one and they no longer make those.

Come on.


The truth is that there's no FM up in them hills, and the folk have never heard of television.

Git yer banjo John Boy, lets us do some pickin' n grinnin', while yer mammy cooks up sum possum....

Radio around here sucks. The same old crappy set list over and over... Starirway to Heaven etc. etc. same sh*t for the last 40 years.

Pandora turns me onto a lot of great new music.