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Touch That Dial
Dec. 20th, 2010 02:37 pm
For those who have never done it, here is how to operate a 1970 car radio.
It has a horizontal dial with one knob to the left, another to the right, and five buttons in a row beneath. Turn the left knob for on, off, and volume. Turn the right to tune. Push one of the five buttons to go to a preset station.
Done. Whatever you could say against an AM-only car radio (and there is a LOT) there's never been a "sound system" with better ergonomics. Notably, it's dead easy to run the thing without even looking at it. That's a nice safety feature. I wish those who make car radios today would give more thought to the fact that when you're listening to the thing you're DRIVING DOWN THE ROAD and if you take your eyes off the road for too long YOU WILL DIE.
What brought this to mind is my latest portable radio, which has something like six different ways to tune. That's four more than I will ever use.
There's the standard tuning knob.
Their is their "Easy Tuning System," which I admit is pretty cool; it scans the entire band and registers all listenable signals. Through some digital signal processing magic, it is even pretty good at recognizing what is a signal and what isn't. Then when you turn the tuning knob, it goes directly station to station, skipping the dead space between.
This is somehow different from the auto memory storage, which does much the same thing but into banks of preset memories accessible via pushbutton. There's an alternate version of this, active on the shortwave bands, which scans for new signals and stores them without erasing the ones you have stored previously.
Or you can enter frequencies into memory manually. You can use the keyboard to enter a frequency directly. You can set the radio to scanning the band and playing a few seconds of each station it encounters, and at any point you can stop it, add it to your "ETS" register, or enter it into one of the pushbutton memories.
Whichever way you do it, though, you still have more the illusion of choice than real choice.
I call this the Wal-Mart Effect because that's where I first noticed it. Our Wal-Mart has, for example, a whole wall of yogurt. That seems to give you a lot of choice. But look at it and you start to realize that you have 20 brands of strawberry, 20 of blueberry, and 20 of vanilla. Kind of like politics; same crap, different label.
Up here Out in the Pickers, as we are, we're in radio relay country. So we get a lot of stations, but it's three repeaters of the rock station, three of the country station, six of the insipid right-wing JAYZUSS!!! station (although those might actually be different stations; it's really hard to tell them apart), four Bob and Tom, a Howard Stern or two, and a couple dozen Rush Limbaugh. That is one way in which 1970 radio actually was better. It still followed Stugeon's Law- 90% of everything is crap- but at least it wasn't the exact same crap, synchronized on every station you could hear.
But let it pass.
I was amused, though, that my little pocket AM-FM-shortwave set has as many memories as it does. It has 100 memories for AM alone.
Think on that. 100 memories in a band that has only 120 channels to begin with. If they'd only included a few more, I could tune through every single frequency in the band by going memory to memory to memory-- which, I'm sure you'll agree, has to be far more efficient than doing the same thing by, oh, twisting a big knob or something.
It has a horizontal dial with one knob to the left, another to the right, and five buttons in a row beneath. Turn the left knob for on, off, and volume. Turn the right to tune. Push one of the five buttons to go to a preset station.
Done. Whatever you could say against an AM-only car radio (and there is a LOT) there's never been a "sound system" with better ergonomics. Notably, it's dead easy to run the thing without even looking at it. That's a nice safety feature. I wish those who make car radios today would give more thought to the fact that when you're listening to the thing you're DRIVING DOWN THE ROAD and if you take your eyes off the road for too long YOU WILL DIE.
What brought this to mind is my latest portable radio, which has something like six different ways to tune. That's four more than I will ever use.
There's the standard tuning knob.
Their is their "Easy Tuning System," which I admit is pretty cool; it scans the entire band and registers all listenable signals. Through some digital signal processing magic, it is even pretty good at recognizing what is a signal and what isn't. Then when you turn the tuning knob, it goes directly station to station, skipping the dead space between.
This is somehow different from the auto memory storage, which does much the same thing but into banks of preset memories accessible via pushbutton. There's an alternate version of this, active on the shortwave bands, which scans for new signals and stores them without erasing the ones you have stored previously.
Or you can enter frequencies into memory manually. You can use the keyboard to enter a frequency directly. You can set the radio to scanning the band and playing a few seconds of each station it encounters, and at any point you can stop it, add it to your "ETS" register, or enter it into one of the pushbutton memories.
Whichever way you do it, though, you still have more the illusion of choice than real choice.
I call this the Wal-Mart Effect because that's where I first noticed it. Our Wal-Mart has, for example, a whole wall of yogurt. That seems to give you a lot of choice. But look at it and you start to realize that you have 20 brands of strawberry, 20 of blueberry, and 20 of vanilla. Kind of like politics; same crap, different label.
Up here Out in the Pickers, as we are, we're in radio relay country. So we get a lot of stations, but it's three repeaters of the rock station, three of the country station, six of the insipid right-wing JAYZUSS!!! station (although those might actually be different stations; it's really hard to tell them apart), four Bob and Tom, a Howard Stern or two, and a couple dozen Rush Limbaugh. That is one way in which 1970 radio actually was better. It still followed Stugeon's Law- 90% of everything is crap- but at least it wasn't the exact same crap, synchronized on every station you could hear.
But let it pass.
I was amused, though, that my little pocket AM-FM-shortwave set has as many memories as it does. It has 100 memories for AM alone.
Think on that. 100 memories in a band that has only 120 channels to begin with. If they'd only included a few more, I could tune through every single frequency in the band by going memory to memory to memory-- which, I'm sure you'll agree, has to be far more efficient than doing the same thing by, oh, twisting a big knob or something.
