When I interviewed CNET’s “Audiophiliac,” Steve Guttenberg, on last weekend’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, he mentioned the potential end of FM radio in Europe. It’s already history in Norway, but the chances that it’ll go away in the U.S. are probably on the low side of zero. Still, terrestrial radio appears to be […]

So is the conventional wisdom correct? Is broadcast radio truly dead, yesterday’s news and all that? Now this ages me, but when I grew up, FM radio was the luxury you added to a car only if you checked off the appropriate box on the option sheet. FM meant clean sound, relatively free of hiss, […]

I used to collect radios, lots of them. Maybe that’s why I got into broadcasting in the first place, since I could actually be heard on one of those contraptions. Indeed, during my long-ago teen-aged years, I built a few, ranging from simple models with a few spare parts, to full-blown multichannel receivers. Unless I’m […]

It seems all too common. Rather than compete with Apple by building a better product, Microsoft continues to use focus groups and PowerPoint presentations to devise the features that its rival products do not possess. Worse, this is done without regard to whether those features are even desired or useful. Take this fall’s contribution to […]