The cold and snow, and now the wood stove, still has me a tad behind. So something fun.
I saw this tweet and was sad:
At first I thought there wouldn’t be anybody who didn’t know. But then I recalled videos of kids (these days!) who were confronted by rotary telephones and suchlike ancient technology and couldn’t figure out how to use any of it.
Thus I suppose there might be some who haven’t a clue what an AM radio is or how to work one.
Turning one on and adjusting the volume ought not be too difficult, since the radio only has two controls. But after getting it on, then what? Does anybody under 50 (40? 30?) know how to “tune in” a station? Or, more importantly, know which station they want to tune into?
If you were in Michigan and I asked you to dial in WJR (“The great voice of the great lakes”), would the young know what that meant?
Would you?
Here’s our poll (below). The ages are 60 years or older, or 59 years or younger. It’s already clear a good chunk of readers are grumpy old men, hence I wanted to separate the men from the boys. As I myself reach more enlightened ages, I have learned the thing about being grumpy is that as you age, you earn the right and wisdom to speak about what is going wrong with kids these days.
Anyway, in the poll, I use “listen” to mean on an actual physical AM radio, any radio that has AM capability, even if it’s digital. I do not mean computers or “devices” hooked up to internet streams: these do not count as radios. I mean something used to tune in a frequency over the air.
I mean a radio, like in your car or home. I should ask a separate question of how many listen outside cars, or include more ages, but I dislike multi-questions surveys. Let me know in the comments instead.
(The poll asks if you routinely listen to AM, and are 60+ or 59 or younger. If you don’t want to answer at the other site, feel free to put it in comments.)
You figure what “routinely” means to you.
With the increase, and now ubiquity, of switch-mode power supplies (if you know, you know), and with “devices” proliferating, the air is flooded with noise and interference. “Devices” have trained human ears, especially in the not-yet-grumpy, to expect pristine audio. I don’t think many now have a tolerance for static, which is a necessary component to listening to AM.
If you are under, say, 50, do you even know what static is?
Many grumparians still listen to talk radio, and most of that is old-school conservative (OSC). Old, not new-school. The younger have moved on from these older voices, awakening to new (which is to say, ancient) political realities. The young realize the 20th Century is at long last fading away.
The young are quite right about the older voices losing relevance. There isn’t much point in listening to OSC radio. You already know in advance what will be said. If you only had the de-host-identified transcripts from any OSC show, you couldn’t tell the difference between any of them.
(Incidentally, which of you guys are buying time shares? All I hear when DXing are commercials promising to get you out of them.)
There exists a veritable flood of podcasts with new-school right-wing thinking, and as far as I know, none of these have been picked up by radio bosses. A tremendous missed opportunity.
The same fear of risk that pervades the rest of the culture infects radio, too. Instead of new movies, we have the umpteenth remake of a tired franchise, this time boldly sex and race swapping the hero (now heroine). Brave, brave.
Stations are shutting down, some countries have eliminated all AM (and shortwave) broadcasts, car manufacturers are trying not to include AM, which means the habit of listening can’t form. I was raised on radio love the old AM. I hate to see it go.
Are you listening?
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AM radio’s life ends when its sold advertising dies. Period. Rush saved AM radio…for a while. The AM end is nigh.
yes, i listen to talk radio, espeially when drivingfrom MI to CA and back every few months. the farm report i IA and NE are always interesting, as are thelocal news commentators.
Now you get static on AM when driving next to a semi.
The goal was to root out any possibility of long distance communication that cannot be controlled – the truth might get out. People in Minnesota might be able to pick up a Texas radio station without the authorities knowing about their listening habits.
66 and I listen to AM radio in the car, though not nearly as much as I used to (RIP, Rush). Local talk radio (SE Virginia) used to be pretty good but even that has gone downhill.
“FM… no static at all.”
FM is great for music. AM is great for talk. But all the talk stars have died. When I scroll through the AM bands in my car these days, it’s nothing but religion, sports, and foreign jibber-jabber.
I used to listen to the radio professionally. Yes, I know what static sounds like, and what it actually is. And when some static isn’t really static. And what those weird but oddly clear beeping and rushing signals are for.
Yeppers. Grew up on late-night blowtorches like KAAY in Little Rock (Beaker Street) and KDKA in Pittsburg. I used to tool around home in an early 60’s Plymouth of my dad’s listening to classical music on AM from WOI in Ames, and I swear it sounded better through the AM radio on that car than what I get from Sirius XM today. Of course I’m hearing impaired now. But all the data compression they do with digital music really destroys the timbre. I even did a stint as a DJ at a 5000 watt AM station back home before I went to college. Now I listen at night through ear buds as sort of a white noise generator. Mostly talk at night. FM is deader than AM since our Houston public outlet stopped playing classical.
Under 50. Used to listen to EWTN which was on AM in some places but they are gay and feminist now. There are some good AM shows but they all also record the show as a podcast which is better audio quality and you can FF the ads. Most of am talk radio is trash that we used to listen to only because it was the only option. Nobody whose job is to talk into a microphone has anything intelligent or interesting to say relative to men who do things. There are a great many podcasts which are far better plus more audiobooks than one could listen to in a lifetime. You can get software that will read out of copyright classics to you which are free from Gutenberg and so on. Who do I want to listen to about great power politics, some idiot on the radio or Metternich? More bands should be allowed for HAM use.
Radio is better than prerecorded media only if it’s live and allows real time interaction among a relatively small listener base and the host. Regulation kills that because interaction is “managed” and the goal is to expand audience rather than perfect communication among a core group. Otherwise all it does is introduce the corporate station as an unnecessary and unwelcome mediator.
Every household should own at least one AM radio and batteries to power it. AM radio has a superpower in that it can travel a very long distance at night. If your whole metro area loses power, you will be totally in the dark as far as information goes. Internet will be down. Cell will be down. FM radio doesn’t go far.
But your AM radio can pick up broadcasts a thousand miles away. I am in Philadelphia and routinely pick up Chicago, Nashville (I occasionally listen to Grand Ole Opry on WSM) and I used to pick up a Saturday night disco out of (Toronto (IIRC)) and many others.
Do you have a stereo decoder for AM stereo? There is an AM stereo station in Michigan (WION). AM stereo sounds great. They stream the AM content on the internet. The source they use for the stream is an AM stereo receiver that receives their signal. IOW, it’s not the source going out to the broadcast atenna, it’s the stream coming into the station via the radio waves. So you really get a good representation of what AM stereo sounds like.
Shango066 (who I know you watch) has a great series of videos on it. Sadly, they have not made an AM stereo receiver in decades.
From 2000 till 2020 I was living outside the US, (and radio wasn’t much fun in China).When I returned, AM was already moribund. Yes, I do miss Rush, and Art Bell and classical WQXR in New York, but now we have Ozempic to modulate our amplitude.
Over sixty, definitely grumpy. My dad was an AM radio engineer, announcer, and disc jockey at stations all over California in the 1950s. I grew up listening to AM on transistor radios and crystal radios. Now I’ve got a small collection of tabletop radios from the late ’30s to ’50s, and a 1936 RCA console radio that has AM, short wave, and medium wave bands. I have it on a long copper wire antenna, and at night I sit in the dark and watch the glowing green Magic Eye as I DX AM stations all over the western U.S., and SW and MW stations all over the world.
Since you mentioned rotary dial telephones…my wife’s teenage niece was at our house, and I found her looking at my 1925 Kellogg candlestick telephone. I said she could make a call with it, but she didn’t know what to do. I told her to pick up the ear piece, wait for the dial tone, and then make the call by turning the dial. Instead of putting her finger in the holes, she turned the dial by grasping its outer rim, as if it was a big knob.
AM radio sat at the center of every Boomer’s life 1960-1970. FM may have been out there, but for the vast majority in the center of the country it was WLS out of Chicago, and CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario. That was where we heard the Beatles, the Stones, the Animals, the Temptations, the Kinks, the Turtles, Tommy James & the Shondells, Marvin Gaye, et al. That was where Rock & Roll (hootchie-koo) exploded. That was the fuse which lit Woodstock and launched FM with its ability to play ENTIRE ALBUMS: not just ‘Light My Fire’ (the 2min. AM version) but the 7min album version + Crystal Ship, Backdoor Man, The End!
AM was IT on every car’s radio dial….(what else was there)…and listening to Larry Lujack spin Top 40 hits over and over and over again was how we all learned all the songs so thoroughly well that 50, 60 years later we can still recognize chords (can play them on air guitar) and sing the lyrics to “I Think We’re Alone Now”…. or “I had something to dream last night”.
FM and album rock gave us the freedom to listen to anything…and Rock itself changed rapidly, inventing new genres and sub-genres seemingly ever few week…but when we all moved away from AM/Top 40, pounding through on every tinny car speaker on every street in America, we lost something too.
In my 40s. Had such a radio in the 80s that was shaped like He-mans head on one side and Skeletor on the other. Then a boom box. Used to listen to Rush Limbaugh in the car in college. Can’t listen to AM in the car anymore because the newfangled radio constantly switching to XM ad stations so I actually don’t even bother with FM for the same reason. It won’t let me put it exclusively on FM or AM but when I try to scan to the next station sneaks an XM ad station in and I have to hit next 30 times to get past all the XM stations that are exactly the aame since I don’t pay the XM cartel, so I just listen to mp3s off my USB stick and never use the radio.
In Australia, there are quite a few AM stations. Definitely better reception with FM especially with the severe summer storms we have. There is also Digital broadcast radio in Australia uses the DAB+ standard and is still after 11 years not available in regional areas, mostly the coastal cities.
Rush passed on and Savage retired.
First car had AM only and Rush was wildly entertaining in a vast wasteland.
Other times I said WTF is he on about and turned it off.
Love this!! We have two AM radios … all thanks be to God!!
God bless, C-Marie
Yep. Flyover, so during the daytime, there was only local dreck, but nighttime, KFYR (Bismark), KOMA (Oklahoma City), WLW (Cinncinnati, my dad remembered when it had a 500,000 watt experimental license), WHO (Iowa somewhere), WWL (Nawlins) and if you drove out on the big hill south of the place, you could get KSFO (San Fran), KSL (Salt Lake), WSM (Nashville) and WABC and WOR (New York). I’m forgetting a bunch of them. Happens.
Now every time I have to replace one of the appliances, I have to move the radio.
Over 60, used to listen to AM all the time as a kid. Mostly WHO and other Des Moines stations. WHO would play some older radio theater on some evenings back in the 1970’s. Got into NPR for a while until I figured out they were only telling half of the story. Around dusk NPR would drop their power output and you’d lose the station. Now, I’d rather listen to an audio book dl’d on my phone in the car.