Vintage fm?

[Dave Hewitt]

Hi
In the early seventies I had a Metrosound st 20 amp and matching fm tuner,the sound on fm was in my view amazing,I used to hurry up from work at Saturday dinner to listen to radio 2,to something like Ray Coniffe and his orchestra and singers ,it was like being there.Cant say that the broadcasts at the moment are anything like they were,and my tuners are far better quality now,including tl3 and audiolab.I have some friends who live in Crete and when I visit them am amazed at the quality of the local fm station[Mires fm]I feel pretty sure that the Greeks dont have better gear than the BBC.Are we being down graded quality wise deliberately to make this digital crap at the moment sound nearly as good as poor fm?
Cheers Dave.

[Ali Tait]

Probably!

[DSJR]

Vintage FM, despite the 65db signal to noise ratio in Stereo, USED this dynamic range to fantastic effect at one time. I don't think they do any more as compression is automatically added both in the studio and at the final PCM bay as the signal leaves BH.

I was told that the FM signal is basically the compressed digital one sent out to the FM transmitters and not now a top quality feed as was in past decades. I've also found that the continuous high level signals with plenty of over-intense speech seems to upset many old "second-tier" tuners, making them "ssssspitch" when before this would rarely have been a problem.

My Cambridge T55 can offer an almost holographic sound-field (false or otherwise, I don't know), but give the poor thing a strongly modulated voice and it spitches and spats all over the place. It has at least two tired looking caps in the power supply and i'll have a go at these to see what happens...

[Barry]

Vintage FM, despite the 65db signal to noise ratio in Stereo, USED this dynamic range to fantastic effect at one time. I don't think they do any more as compression is automatically added both in the studio and at the final PCM bay as the signal leaves BH.

I was told that the FM signal is basically the compressed digital one sent out to the FM transmitters and not now a top quality feed as was in past decades. I've also found that the continuous high level signals with plenty of over-intense speech seems to upset many old "second-tier" tuners, making them "ssssspitch" when before this would rarely have been a problem.

My Cambridge T55 can offer an almost holographic sound-field (false or otherwise, I don't know), but give the poor thing a strongly modulated voice and it spitches and spats all over the place. It has at least two tired looking caps in the power supply and i'll have a go at these to see what happens...

I have never found this to be a problem on either my Quad FM3 (now retired) or its replacement, the FM4. What does annoy me is the excessive bass or 'chestiness' present on the voices of the continuity announcers, regardless of gender. Tolerable on the Quads, unbearable on the Leak Troughline III.

Regards

[Nick_G]

FM can sound very good indeed on my recently-acquired Yamaha T-85 tuner with the right programming. Even BBC Radio 2 this afternoon on a Beach Boys track, there was a real sense of depth with Brian Wilson's vocals projecting well in front of the instruments behind him.

It certainly sounds better than DAB!