Radio Envy

I spent last week in LA and southern california and although the weather was fantastic, I did not come back with a tan.  That’s because I don’t tan, I burn.

But I did come back with some serious radio envy.

LA’s radio rocks!

And NY’s radio sucks.

Here in NYC, I have two options for radio. 

WFUV 90.7 which I cannot recieve with any quality most of the time in Manhattan
WBGO 88.3, a great jazz station but I am the only one in the family who wants to listent to it.

Everything else on the NY dial is programmed garbage as far as I am concerned.

In LA, I also had two favorite radio stations, but they are so much better than my two options in NYC.

Indie 103.1 – a great indie rock station with a strong signal that I could get all over LA
KCRW 89.9 – a better version of WFUV.  The Morning Becomes Ecletic show alone makes this station fantastic

In addition to these two stations, I regularly found other stations playing music I wanted to listen to in LA.  This never happens in NYC.

I imagine this has something to do with the fact that people in LA live in their cars, but I still think there is something really wrong with this picture.

As regular readers know from my exploding radio posts, I sure hope the bandwidth upgrade that is coming with the conversion to HD radio fixes this problem.