In article , Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In the early '60s, living in a bedsit, I had a mono valve Jason FM tuner
feeding a Mullard 3/3 feeding a Goodmans Maxim. And at the low listening
levels it could only produce sounded marvellous.

I remember building one of those Jason tuner kits. The first FM radio I ever
heard was one that a friend had built, and it was such a staggering
improvement on the best MW radio I'd ever built that I just had to have one.
Did you wind your own coils too?

Used to love listening to
those R2 BBC Radio Orchestra sessions which sounded so much cleaner than
any record.

I think the 60s and 70s should probably be regarded as a "golden age" when
radio was potentially the best audio quality available to the home listener,
with none of the shortcomings of the two main recording systems available at
the time (analogue tape and disk). Since then, its technical ability has been
surpassed by that of a much better digital system (CD), and threatened with
replacement with a worse one (DAB). I doubt if this situation will ever
recur, as the best recordings are much better than the best broadcasts can
ever be, and the internet is gradually becoming the delivery medium of
choice, because the quality can be anything a broadcaster or publisher wants
it to be.

Rod.