sdwulfdawg said:
It occurred to me this afternoon, that at least for me, San Diego radio has become so irrelevant on the same level how the San Diego Union-Tribune has been largely irrelevant. If I want news, I turn on KNX or KFI in Los Angeles... If I want to listen to a particular chat show, I find it on the web and listen to their webstream. (In particular, I enjoy Phil Hendrie, but now that KFMB starts it in its third hour at midnight, I listen to it on the web via Crn (Cable Radio Network) or listen to it through KCMD 970 in Portland via the web when it comes on at 10 p.m.)
Just as KOGO has become a disseminator of commercials only (as has KFMB), what's the point? Then there is KFMB which, at night, has become one big automation error with dead air, local commercials running on top of network feeds, etc. News is largely voicetracked from hours and hours before, so it is pretty old by the time it runs through its cycle. Then you have the trainwreck called KOGO which still advertises itself as "Your 24 Hour Local News Source" which runs but two local news headlines (voicetracked) before they dump yet into another long commercial block.
San Diego has not been a radio-friendly town ever since FM became the dominant side of the AM-FM equation. Our hilly terrain has always made for rough reception of local FM's in many areas of the county and if you commute from many parts of the North County you may not be able to find one FM you can listen to for the whole drive so button-punching becomes a necessity. Even on the AM side a KFI can be received just as well or better than a KOGO in many areas and KNX's seeming universal coverage of Southern California gives it an edge even without accounting for its superior news coverage (with San Diego's Tom Reopple on staff, it has the only experienced radio news reporter in San Diego).
KOGO is just a repeater station for syndicated programming with an out-of-town comedian playing the part of local pundit in the morning. KFMB is, well, a waste of electricity as are all the other AM's in town.
I had narrowed my radio choices down to KPBS, KRTH and sometimes the Walrus, but I recently bought myself a new iPod Touch with a great little Griffin Roadtrip adapter that feeds it through the car's FM radio. I used the Walrus's button on the radio for the Roadtrip, but kept KRTH because they still have a great airstaff that adds to the ambiance of oldies radio: the guys on the Walrus just sound like plain vanilla radio announcers who add no value, so why not just play more music?
Lately, the iPod provides about 90% of my in-car listening (and as with people who are not sociophobic recluses, there is no such thing as in-home radio listening) and it has become a lot more fun than I'd imagined when I plopped down the bucks for the Touch. Even going through the little Griffin FM transmitter, the sound is way better than what I hear in conventional FM radio stations and the ability to listen to what I like, when I want to, without commercials and lame announcers, is a real joy.
I used to do a fair amount of internet radio listening in the car but some of my favorite stations there reduced the quality of their data streams and lost my interest in the process. The recording industry is doing its best to make it too expensive for internet radio - and even terrestrial radio - to play music so why not just create your own station on the iPod (or Zune if you drank just too much of the MS Kool-Aid)? I have boxes full of audio cassettes and just orderd a $110 cassette player that will plug into my computer's USB port and let me digitize the tapes using the included software. I still have a turntable and the USB cassette player can accept a phono preamp output or any other audio line-out source.
Now if someone has some old tape of KSDO in its heyday as a news station, could you let me borrow them so I can put them on the iPod and once again listen to great San Diego newscast in the car? I figure that earthquake and brushfire coverage should recycle especially well, and some old KGB News Brothers tapes would sound really good during the noon hour
