Radio is really good in Ann Arbor, although not quite fabulous.  We have WEMU, the Eastern Michigan University NPR station, which plays a good variety of jazz, including the pre-war stuff, with some blues and not too much NPR yak yak yak (and I can say this as somebody who remembers listening to Linda Wertheimer report on Watergate on WGUC, but more than an hour a day of radio news, left, right or center, will make you crazy, trust me.  Take your hand away from the knob and back away from the radio).  We have WCBN, the U of M student station, which features such classics as the Jerk Officers' Digital Dump (at 7:30 AM, no less), which is why we love student-run stations.  Within fifty miles are WKAR in Lansing and WGTE in Toledo, Detroit Public Schools' WRCJ and CBC Radio 2 in Windsor. Each has some virtues.  CBC in particular has good sonics and plays some pretty interesting music, I particularly like the Canadian avant garde classical programming, and don't forget the bagpipes... 

But all of these stations are music snob radio, and none are as wonderful as WNOP, Radio Free Newport, was (it's now an unspeakably evil Catholic propaganda station), and if you are a moldy fig who knows who Leo Underhill, Ray Scott, Ty Williams, Bunky Tadwell, Dick Pike and Oscar Treadwell were, please drop me a line.  The station was in Newport, Kentucky (where Jerry Springer used to go to get massages when he was a Cincinnati City Councilman, so much stress, you know), over a beauty parlor, right next door to the Frontier Bar on Monmouth Street.  When it snowed, other stations would read the school closings.  Leo Underhill would read the bar closings.  Two guys you may have heard of, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, wrote An Oscar for Treadwell and Oska T, respectively, for OT (when he was in Philadelphia, but he was just as cool in Newport).  Other stations would broadcast sermons on Sunday mornings; Ray Scott would play Sugarcane Harris.  May God rest their souls, they gave me more pleasure as a teen-ager than any adult legally could.

No, we don't have any radio stations that cool.  I don't think anybody ever will again.  As far as I know, none of these guys are still with us (Ty Williams passed on in 2009).  But, it could be worse (it will no doubt get so).

OK, back to business.  This stock NAD C-420 is now in my office:

It's OK.  Getting decent reception on fringe stations--and even WEMU, which is about five miles away--is an issue when using the usual cheap sorts of FM antennae, like a folded dipole or an inexpensive Terk unit with an amplifer.  I seem to have a lot of multipath here, and of course there's tons of RF interference in the neighborhood from the computers everywhere (we have four just in our house).  Before even the most cursory due diligence, I sprung for an audiophile-approved Magnum Dynalab ST-2:

By inspecting this unit after purchasing it, I determined that this is a relabled Metz Communications 288, which youcould buy for about half the audiophile-approved price from one of their distributors (see the web site).  But, I'm not sure you want to.  It does work better than the Terk; using it indoors, I can receive WEMU and WUOM clearly, and, on a good day, WDET and WRCJ. I suppose it would work better if it were mounted outside, which I am sure would upset the Medical Center.  I considered the following DIY unit, but before I could assemble it (and also because of some concern about the WAF), I determined that the VHF antenna put on the roof of my house by a previous owner was not broken, but that at least one of the signal splitters that had been put in the line was, and, by removing all of them, I achieved the quantum leap in FM sensitivity I had hoped to achieve with the ST-2.  So, the ST-2 now resides in my office in its steel-framed building with my steel office furniture, and I have yet to achieve the office feng shui that will alleviate the interference caused by all those big chunks of metal.  But, it's something to think about when I can't bear to consider Phase I/II trials anymore.

In the meantime, I did something I have wanted to do since I was sixteen (that doesn't involve two cheerleaders), I acquired a piece of McIntosh equipment, an MR-71.  It looks like this:  

The MR-71 is the last tube tuner that McInstosh built.  There is some discussion on the web about whether it is better than the MR-67, and the Scott 330-D has enthusiastic support, but I always wanted a Mac something, and I found a good example on eBay (back when ordinary Americans had money, and no, I did not take out a home equity loan to buy it, which you would understand if you saw my home), so I bought it and sent it to New Orleans to aligned by Dr. Terry Riemer.  Terry is a "retired" Professor of Electrical Engineering (you academics will know what ' "retired" ' means) and he has the equipment to do it right, but he is a craftsman and does not necessarily do it fast.  So, I highly recommend his services, but don't expect overnight turnaround.  Using the rooftop antenna, I get great reception, and a beautiful FM sound, especially from CBC, who still play their own recordings.  Most NPR-like stations do too much to the signal now to get really great sound.  WRCJ in particular screws around with the equalization so that their station sounds good in the car, but can be hard to listen to at home.  One other thing I have noticed is that this tuner was never designed to reject the RF noise generated by computers, DACs and such; the MR-71 sits next to the Apogee Mini-Dac, which has to be turned off for radio listening, and the more computers I turn off, the better radio sounds.  I think there is a lesson there.  

I also have an iPhone 3G with an internet radio application.  There are some advantages to IR, even if the sound quality isn't always so wonderful.  One advantage I highly recommend is the wonderful and just slightly obsessive Phil Schaap weekdays at 8:20AM on WKCR.  It is worth it just to hear him intone, "Charlie Parker, at the Hi-De-Ho, March, 1947."  Try it yourself, say it in your best solemn radio announcer voice. How can you resist?

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