I am now grooving to the tunes of the station at the bottom of the FM dial – thanks to the arrival yesterday of my new DLO TransPod. As advertised, it is simple to set up and use, and now in my truck I am listening to the tunes and talks from my iPod Shuffle that beams audio to my radio rather than the cruft on the air waves.
The audio quality was pretty good, a tiny amount of background hiss, but I may just have to fiddle with some different presets for blank airwaves. Briefly you may get a little noise going under high power lines. I ordered mine on Amazon (which actually fronts for J&R) at a sub US$50 price, which is lower than list and other stores.
On my station there are no commercials and the music they play is all stuff I like.
Yes, I still will want every now and then to listen to the great news and reports on NPR, but I cannot say in the last 2 years that I could really stand to listen to commercial radio… not that my tastes are all that discriminating (they are actually rather questionable), but when you spend your days and nights on the net, accessing what you want, it is imprisonment to be listening to someone’s guess as to what you want to hear. Not even to mention ads and DJ chatter, just 2 notches above email spam in my book.
No, it is not the “end of radio” Wired covered in March 2005, but the power, desire, and hunger for choice, customization, self relevance is a hake up wake up that all media forms should be paying attention to, and facing not ignoring– from TV to print publishers to… oh my gosh, maybe even educators.
