Like Val, Neil sees no reason to despair over the current crop of radios. Neil writes:
I definitely agree with Val. I have a few great, newer radios that have features and performance that I didn't have with some of the older ones. One recent discovery, is the Meloson M7. Such an amazing sounding radio for the size. Is it perfect? No. But, for the money, and size, it is one of my favorites these days. I keep it loaded with a mix of music, and it is my first choice for listening to WCBS-AM in the morning, and NPR on the weekends. Except when I'm in the kitchen. My Sangean K-200 kitchen radio is on duty on top of my fridge. It gets every station I need it to receive, including a couple that are not all that easy, and with very pleasant audio. It plays the local NPR station on Sunday mornings every week while I cook breakfast for everyone, and stays on for the duration of Sunday Baroque. The rest of the time it serves as out kitchen timer and night light. My Tecsun PL-390 is the travel and portable radio of choice for me. Decent audio, and good performance, along with awesome battery life make it great for travel, and the automatic search and scan features are great for exploring the bands. In a pinch I can tether my old Sansa C-series mp3 to it for some music, and the Sansa fits in the zippered accessory pouch in the case, along with the audio cable, and an extra set of AAs. My Degen De-321 is a marvel of cheap engineering. It's not a top-notch performer, but for the money, and size, is just an amazing piece of modern technology. SDR receivers are the future of radio. I have both HF and VHF/UHF models at the moment, and once you get used to the waterfall and spectrum displays, it's hard to work without them. The ability to visually notch out interference, and adjust bandwidth, IF shift, and other filters makes pulling stations out of the noise easy as point-click-drag-drop. Radio is getting more interesting every year. DSP, SDR, and other newer technologies will keep it interesting for awhile. Unfortunately the media itself is withering, giving us less to listen to. Such a shame that now that we have all of this wonderful technology, the content is thinning out.
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