FM Radio is dead ....R.I.P

I have been spoiled by WFMT in Chicago. It is the finest radio station in the country, in its 60th year now. I purchased a Magnum Dynalab 106 Triode specifically to listen to this station. When they broadcast live performances, as they do several times a week, the sound can be astonishingly realistic. More importantly, WFMT is a very human place, with lively and knowledgeable program hosts, and a constant parade of musical luminaries stopping by to chat. It has a genuine sense of community, something the internet cannot match.

By contrast, internet stations and streaming services feel soulless and empty, like listening to a robot free-associate, like flipping through a wall-paper sample book. Sure, you can tailor your Pandora feed to the n-th degree, but in the end, you are narrowing your horizons and eliminating any chance of surprise. Pandora is the opposite of good radio.

Mitch4t, you may be right about the variety that Pandora can offer, and I can see how Pandora helps you discover new music. But my initial point is that a good local radio station can offer something that the internet cannot, and that is a sense of community.

It may be my particular strangeness that I can only listen to an internet stream for so long before I feel kind of disconnected and disoriented. It is the same sensation I get after playing a video game for too long.

Music has always been a very social thing for me, whether I am listening to it or playing it myself. I guess I just like knowing where my music is coming from, who is choosing it, which ensemble and conductor recorded it, when it was recorded and so on. I must be getting old.....