BeigeJournal

Something I’ve been thinking about with all the podcasting excitement, and portable MP3 players in general, is how amazingly crappy the broadcast radio experience is, even on just a technical level. There are all sorts of programming issues, the bad shows, the advertising, the endless promos for upcoming shows—someday, we’re going to hear promos for upcoming promos—but the actual technology doesn’t work well.

Vast swaths of spectrum are reserved for broadcasting, the broadcasters set up huge antenna towers and run transmitters so powerful that the electric bill is a significant operating cost. Yet I hear mostly static. On a portable player, the signal cuts in and out with each step. At home, hiss. I’ve bought antennas, built antennas, hung antennas up in awkward positions, and still, the classical station comes in in hissy mono. The local public station comes in with hiss at home and unlistenable cutting in and out when out walking with a portable radio. I’m not out in the hinterlands, I’m in the city of Milwaukee. Back in Champaign, IL, the college’s station was pretty much unlistenable on campus. I get better ham radio reception sometimes. It’s really amazing to me that so much bandwidth, so much power, such a huge antenna, gives such marginal results. Maybe I’m listening to the wrong stations, but wherever I live, this is what I get.

The MP3 player works fine, of course. The crappiest low-bitrate MP3s sound better than radio, though the radio people are better at setting up decent microphones and getting the levels right than some of the less experienced podcasters. The only radio show I listen to is Pipedreams, but not by radio. No one here plays it. I grab it with streamripper and cron from WDAV’s MP3 stream. It would be a lot easier if was just podcast instead of making us mess with streamripper, but the broadcast mentality lives on. I sent in a donation, and now I have a card good for discounts at some Davidson, North Carolina shops. I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1300 km away. The unlistenable Milwaukee stations (no MP3 streams, even), continue to hit me up for donations.