Saying hello to better radio

Today's post is a little different to going into a major change in part of my stereo system that had remained constant for a good decade or so.

There is a longish history to putting together a hifi system and usually I tried to get matching amplifiers and tuners at least visually if not by manufacture rather than the more commonplace two in one of a "receiver" in North America simply because you requirements of the amplificationin one may be  in excess of you needs of the radio unit aka a "Tuner".

For me that translates as having great stereo FM for services such as BBC Radio Three but not needing a lot of presets and while AM reception is useful I normally use a quality portable for things like TalkSport Radio and the like.

With the first Rotel system a RA313 amplifier was matched to a fairly simple manual tuned tuner  and when that after some sideways moves that didn't quite work out I got a Rotel RA820B, I bought the matching RT820L that offered long Wave for Radio 4 but again manually tuned.

Recently though it didn't just lose its illumination for the tuning dial which can be fixed but it lost sensitivity on FM which meant it was time to change it over.

The first thing to say about the Tangent Tuner II is it's quite a bit smaller and has two different wavebands on it.

The first is VHF/FM which first arrived on the scene here in 1955/6 after some experiments around how the signal was modulated and from the late 1960's stereo multiplex transimssions were added.

The other is more recent and that is Digital Audio Broadcasting, usually abbrevated to "Dab" which in reality is VHF Band III and digital broadcasting using two differing coding techniques that was initially launched as an experimental service in 1995 and for which most stations are transmitted on the same frequencies around the country to help boost reception.

There is a period of change and a good deal of instability around if the VHF/FM service will remain or indeed if both will be replaced by internet streaming at home and on Smartphones while out.

Part of that is around concerns over the technical quality of the signal - some broadcasters are using relatively poor sounding mono - favouring more stations rather than higher fidelity although this model has an output so for better stations you can route the digital signal to a external higher quality digital to analogue convertor for the best possible sound which is what I have done apart from the traditional RCA line outputs you connect to an amplifer to.

In that way it does cover all bases as today there is very little on the Long and Medium wave am bands that is exclusive in the way that in my childhood you had to listen to Radio Four Long wave for cricket and Radio One on Medium wave only for your chart pop music with fading and whistles from nearby televisions affecting reception.

Digital does bring silent backgrounds so you can here the coughing of the audience in a live concert to a silent background and better high frequencies compared to the A.M.