Something was messing with my usual crisp reception of 88.1 FM KJAZZ, and for a brief, panicked moment, I suspected rogue RFI had infiltrated my house. My trusty Tecsun PL-880, usually a fortress against interference, was coughing up static like an asthmatic saxophonist. I switched to my Tecsun PL-680—same sputtering disaster. After a round of troubleshooting that felt like an exorcism, I moved both radios away from the wall and onto a small table. Just like that, KJAZZ returned in all its smooth, undistorted glory. Lesson learned: walls are the enemy.
This minor fiasco led me to re-evaluate the much-hyped DSP-enhanced reception. I hate to say it, but my so-called cutting-edge DSP radios—Qodosen DX-286, Tecsun PL-880, and Tecsun PL-990—aren’t doing anything special on FM. My old-school PLL receivers, the Tecsun PL-680 and PL-660, hold their own just fine. The fancy digital signal processing? Overrated.
Speaking of things that need fixing, the shrill, ear-piercing speaker sound on the 660 and 680 had been plaguing me for too long—until I discovered that a simple flick of the Treble to Bass setting transformed their audio from "tin can torture" to something much warmer, even pleasant. A revelation, really.
Still, there’s something I can’t quite explain: despite their objectively better speaker quality, the 880 and 990 don’t captivate me the way the 660 and 680 do. Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe it’s a longing for a simpler, pre-DSP era—when radios didn’t try so hard to be smart, and all you needed was a decent tuner, a good antenna, and a quiet room.
An electrically quiet room is hard to come by these days.
I got my PL-660 in 2011 and remember going to a nearby park at night, over a hill shielding me from civilization to listen to radio. I still go to parks in the daytime to listen to radio.
Posted by: Kevin | March 07, 2025 at 07:39 AM