Is this just my unit … or ar3 FM broadcasts really that bad?
Most FM stations have compression, DSP, Nielson encoding, then they send the signal to the tower via private digital network as compressed digital stream. Any popular genre station with ads will be like this.
There are stations that still use analog compression, minimal FM processing, no neilson ratings and spin music at full resolution and send it to tower at full resoltuion. But they have to want it really bad. We have a station like that in central NC: WCPE, The Classical Station. The FM signal is glorious. They even spin vinyl now on Monday nights. I don't know if it's digitized before broadcast, but probably is. They're online streams are 128kbps and 96kbps and you can really hear the difference. But most people dont care.
For years, until recently, they had a very noisy channel on their mixing board that affected left channl of of one of their two CD players, and a bad hum on announcers mic etc. But a new engineer has ironed these out (with a little 'help' from a certain audiophile listener named Karen from Kary)
I recently retire my maxed-out Sansui in favor of used entry level MagnumDynalab, for a very nice improvement. Next tweak is swapping out the cheapo original Radio Shack balun transformer up on the antenna for a new Channel Master balun.
