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Chicago Tribune's Motormouth - Pulling the plug on AM

The Audacy radio app is easy to use for any favorite stations AM or FM. Although I did notice once when I was driving to NC and tried to listen to the Bears game on 780 AM on what is now known as Audacy, it wouldn't allow me because I wasn't in the Chicagoland area. Kind of effed up.
 
Deleting AM is happening for a technical reason, so it is not a byproduct of AM being irrelevant. That said, given that a lot of AM listening is done in the car, it's not going to help the prospects for AM unfortunately.
 
The AM reception on the audio in my 2019 RAM is so bad it might as well not be there. Since the back up camera is integrated I certainly am not going to be replacing it. If I need an AM station I just stream it through the bluetooth connections and source it from an app on the cell phone.

If I were shopping for a new car the loss of an AM function would not factor into the buying decision at all. Heck the interior carpet color would be more important to me.
 
When I am in DFW theres an AM station that gives traffic every 10 minutes and is non partisan, traffic is needed at rush hour. FM sucks there as far as rock goes.

Now where I am I don't need AM traffic anymore and have a choice between two FM rock stations that don't play the same three songs all day.
 
peterp1 said:
I'm so sick of deleting stuff that is not even close to obsolete -- e.g. deleting headphone jacks from phones (still drives me nuts that I can't charge phone and listen to headphones at same time),
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Was done to improve water resistance which I think is a good thing. There are adapters available from a range of companies to solve the charging challenge.

adapter.jpg


peterp1 said:
...deleting USB ports from computers...
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I'm delighted they've moved away from the directional USB-A flavor! With C, you never have to flip it over!
 
I repaired a Pioneer tuner for a friend who wanted it sold. When I listed it I was surprised when someone asked if AM worked. I didn't know because I don't receive any where I live. Had to take it 50 miles to a friend's place to find out.
 
i think its simple enough to filter the noise . or maybe just report them to the fcc and see what they have to say about it .
 
petehall347 said:
i think its simple enough to filter the noise . or maybe just report them to the fcc and see what they have to say about it .
Click to expand...

You know this just brought something to my attention. When driving through construction areas on freeways there is often advisory bulletins and its on AM frequency.

Wonder what happens now?
 
Sorry mister-fixit, I disagree on both of your assessments, FM has always had strong listener attention until recently, when other streaming venues became more prevalent and Clear Channel, with the help of the other two major owners, flooded the market with repeating crap. I think I heard AC/DC four times today and I was only in the car for less than an hour, even worse it was the same two songs.

Maybe my radios are different, I use a lot of boomboxes, but I get some nice separation between the stations and at night there's a lot of them. Travelling is different, you find a good station and it's gone after 20 minutes but it seems more of a distance problem.

AM's biggest issue is content, they have so much possiblilty but nothing has really changed for over 30 years. I remember a station in California that talked about 91210 and Melrose Place the day after they aired, you might not like the content but that was fresh and fun and different. AM needs to work on it's strengths instead of doing the same thing it always has, there's so many interesting things they could be doing but don't even try.
 
AM programming in my area is dominated by religion, conservative talk, and sports in that order. If we're honest we can admit that most electric car buyers are unlikely to be very interested in any of those three things. I doubt electric cars will do much to hasten AM's demise.

Much of the reason AM didn't complete its slide into oblivion thirty years ago has to do with Rush Limbaugh. It was well on its way out before he popularized conservative talk radio.
 
Interesting... The closest that I ever come to AM radio is turning the input selector dial on my old Marantz receiver so that it hits the AM band for just a second before I turn it to something else. I do like terrestrial radio, but since I'm not really into conservative talk radio, sports or music stations that tend to play old hits on really tight rotation and with really poor sound quality AM isn't really anything that I've ever tuned into. I grew up with a family that had a KLH compact stereo which only had FM for radio, so AM was never part of my world, even as a kid. I like the kind of news I get from NPR and the kind of music that's eclectic enough to surprise me (fortunately on several different independent FM stations in my area), which isn't the kind of stuff that's available on AM and even if it were the SQ of FM is much better anyway so there wouldn't be much reason for me to check it out. AM has always been broadcast in mono too, right?
 
Well this is interesting and a bit worrying.

AM radio is sometimes the only source of reliable reception in country Australia and is especially used for advising the community in disaster situations.
 
I used to listen to a variety of entertainment programs evenings on AM, now down mainly to WBBM for news and radioldies. Anything else gets streamed off the smartphone.
I miss the old locally produced entertainment from KMOX, WGN, and others I used to catch regularly. John Grayson, Nick Digilio and others worked hard to produce entertaining multi-topical original nightly programming, and Steve and Johnny interviewing every musician of note that visited Chicago. They introduced me to Muriel Anderson and Tommy Emmanuel on nighttime AM.
 
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