Horses for courses?
My first personal radio was a crystal set. Reception of BBC 'Home Service', 'Third Programme' and 'Light Programme' was adequate. My expectation from recorded music was based on the capability of a wind-up acoustic gramophone playing '78s.
Those were fascinating times because audio technology was moving apace; the nowadays wrongly maligned BBC being at the forefront. With respect to listening experience AM radio, in good reception broadcasts, was fine in the generality; nobody expected concert hall or theatre experience.
FM programming drawn from stereo LPs offered frequency, dynamic ranges, and background noise, not much degraded from the disc played in the studio.
Meanwhile provision of home Hi-Fi based on vinyl discs became a major luxury industry. It encompassed a multitude of misleading claims for esoteric equipment and pundits hailed each genuine incremental advance a major leap forward. However, everyone with nous knew that impressions on vinyl suitable for commercial distribution had a pretty much unalterable frequency and dynamic range. The former was adequate then and now for most people. The latter was restrictive for playback of symphonic music; yet, people these days playing popular music on the go in noisy environments and using earpieces of indifferent quality actively deploy dynamic compression.
The major recorded-audio advance in my lifetime was introduction of the CD (and other digital manifestations). It far eclipsed long ago transition from cylinder to shellac disc and thenceforth to vinyl. Standard CD quality is not fully encompassed by FM. In principle, DAB can match CD quality and beyond (for people desirous of ultra-high definition from specially produced recording). In practice, that is not so because of imperatives to compress bandwidth; perhaps lossless compression with matching decompression on receiving devices is the way forward? However, mass musical taste seems well satisfied with lossy music electronically tweaked to cover up deficiencies; this similar to 'pop singles' issued with considerable boost to base and treble so that the heard result on a simple 'record player' or transistor radio was satisfactory; that last from an engineering point of view rather than expectation of remedying musical illiteracy of 'artists'; previous recollections remind me that when transistor radios first appeared on the mass market the number of transistors contained in the device was blazoned on the casing as badge of merit.
'Horses for courses' is response to diverse options for transmitting and receiving audio 'content'. Voice and most drama is coped with adequately on AM, much better and with option for stereo on FM, and to almost any high standard demanded by audiences when transmitted by adequate bandwidth DAB or via the Internet (this last being something the BBC excels at for A/V in general).
Looking to the future, terrestrial air-wave broadcasting of news, information, and entertainment, may end after a couple of decades except for remote niches.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
