Word to the talk. I hardly ever listen to FM radio anymore. Can't stand the damage. I listen to enough music to keep up on trends (I still "study" audio), but I won't subject myself to the irritation and damage in the long term.
And I thought I was the only "old man" around here
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Yeah, I still "study", or keep up with what's up, but it just isn't the pleasure it used to be. And no, it's not a generational music thing (though sure, there's always a little bit of that), it's the crunched productions that just make you want to turn the radio off.
There are still a couple of specialty music-based shows that I listen to when I can, but those are mostly on NPR and small independent stations, and have a format that goes well beyond the Clear Channel/Jack Radio/etc. pablum formats that are Xeroxed out by 99% of the radio stations out there now.
The real dying shame IMHO is not that crunching dynamic rage is SOP these days; it's really not so much, once you get past the commercial playlists. There is a LOT of great music out there being produced even as we speak that does not follow that trend. The problem is that very few listeners ever get to hear them because they never do get past the computerized Big Boy commercial station format restrictions.
What we really need is a return to the (at least semi-) autonomous program director and the role of DJ as musicologist and not just manual laborer. The early days of FM radio were just wonderful, with formats like Triad Radio (and the oft-associated Zodiac News Service) which had formats where the DJ was actually a *talent* and not a robot; somebody with a real ear for and knowledge of music, who put together their own playlists that had real emotion, intelligence, and a sense of humor to them, and which on a regular basis actually turned the listener on to something very good which no one has really heard before or hadn't thought of putting on the playlist before, regardless of genre. When 5 seconds of dead air here or there was not crime, and pacing in the program was an art form and not a formula.
Then to get the news with a real treatment and touch a couple of times a day in 20-minute or 30-minute segments from someone like Zodiac or a funky in-house news *editor*, instead of just some chimp reading warmed-over headlines off the AP newswire for 4 minutes every hour. Man, those were the days.
It's starting to happen on the Internet, but finding these net stations is just too much work for the average passive listener, and - under today's technology - is not an option for the car. You can't just spin the simple radio dial and find what you're looking for. Also, the streaming bandwidth and technology is not quite there yet (or at lest not fully implemented yet) to let the real fidelity of the non-crushed songs to shine.
G.
Er... so, what does it means? BTW, should I tell my friend to push the limit a little further? I don't want to lose the dynamics.
)
