96.3 rip96.3 ripFriday, October 9, 2009 10:37 am. WQXR was the radio station of the
sacred-to-liberalism New York Times
newspaper, subsidized in good times since a few years after I was born
— until yesterday. I doubt that it ever
made any money. ... In theory, yesterday it merely moved
from the FM frequency 96.3 to 105.9, in a complicated transaction where
the public station WNYC wound-up owning it and which, I suspect,
somehow involved a chunk of sometime-evil-Republican Mayor Bloomberg’s
influence / money — because who else could pay for a socialist radio
station spending that kind of money in our depression-battered times? ...
But the 96.3
frequency was stronger than
the new cheapo 105.9 frequency; a NY Hispanic station paid for 96.3 and
now happily runs Spanglish jingles in that spot, and WNYC paid for
whatever remains; the holy ghost of QXR. ... Which apparently includes
at least for a while the services of a few old familiar on-air voices
which would be comforting to us geezers if
we could get the station. ... 
The relative strength of 96.3 is
apparently not dependent on how many transistors you can afford; it has
to do with adjacent channel interference or something and what’s
allowed by FCC regulations....
The result: QXR, as well as going non-commercial, lost a huge chunk of listenership. Namely, us suburbanites. ... I’ve been listening to QXR here in Sunny Suffolk County Long Island for 15 years or so through a television antenna we found on the roof when we moved here. Even with the antenna, stereo was out of the question. ... And so is the wimpy weak 105.9; it’s just noise. ... Actually shortly before the end, I got hold of a Sony XDR-F1HD “high definition” radio at amazon, which had the amazing ability to receive 96.3 in stereo without the TV antenna! ... I’m going to try it on 105.9 with the tv antenna; but hopes are not high....
For better or worse, my earliest memories include WQXR. I have literally listened to this thing my entire life, except when the LOL and I tarried upstate for a few years. ... There is a genre of chamber music — think late Beethoven quartets — that I’ve always called “Betty music” after my mother’s Sunday morning preoccupation upstairs in the solemn brownstone parlor with a giant monophonic-of-course speaker connected to some kind of wretched hi-fi I can’t remember. ... She played the organ in her youth, before she and my father escaped, separately, from the midwest so they could come to Nueva York and be beatniks. ... In later life, I realized the Sunday morning idylls were probably an echo of higher-minded if lower-class music from her churchy youth....
All through my years I’ve cursed
at the
station, their pathetic relentless communist bias, the occasional ugly
fads, as they did their best to drive listeners away. ... But I’ve
kept
listening. ... Why? ... Because there is
no other classical station in NYC.
When I was 28 or something, the other classical music station WNCN
104.3 was converted to pop music with a blasphemous rendition of
“Roll Over Beethoven”. This after years of successful audience
destruction actually worse than QXR’s — but that was something
involving court orders and the management was probably in
fact trying to drive the audience away: the weapon of choice, long
droning monologues by morons replacing the music....
QXR has droning moron monologues too now and then. We turned-off their gala switchover concert last night when some pitiful composer was allowed to drivel for — well it must’ve been at least two or 3 years when we got out — about transparently false feelings and thoughts, all obviously tailored to convince some nominal 8-year-old, i.e. the QXR audience, that the composer was a deeply sensitive thoughtful fellow. ... QXR definitely can get out in front on that; but usually, as necessary-maybe filler, in concerts. ... Announcers apparently naturally want to drone — and the new supposedly genius-popular public radio talk format demonstrates that more than ever — but NCN let loose the Dogs of Drone indeed in its last days....
But when QXR stopped, I felt a surprising sense of loss; I was bereft. This was helped along by an eerie synchronization with the www.wqxr.com site: precisely at 8 pm, when QXR went off the air, the web site keeled over! ... It was deathlike and disturbing, but also amusing; they couldn’t even get that right! ... I mean, if the idea is to drag your listeners along, wouldn’t it’ve been a good idea to make sure the web site was working, and tell them about it? ... Actually, they did tell us about it; but it still wasn’t working. ... Until this morning. ... I cannot tell the pitiful sense of joy and relief I felt when http://www.wqxr.org/q2/ came-up and my familiar personalities and mostly-beautiful music returned! (We got to hear the rest of the inaugural concert, as much as we could stand, when the LOL in the face of my hysterical keening found it on WNYC’s internet feed.)
My
Father’s RadioSo an era ends. ... It isn’t just QXR; it’s radio, and television, and all the centralized controlled media: we’re on our own now, for better or worse. ... Well assuming we have high-speed broadband provided by a friendly monopoly. ... The picture shows the Sony high definition (left) next to my Father’s “Tivoli” table radio, a good-sounding good-tuning (it could get QXR 96.3 even out here) monophonic concocted by the Koss guy; already an antique, it was Koss’s geezer comeback product, imitating in styling and concept previous generations of Koss-branded radios. ... My father had two of them, from his last days at the brownstone and then overkill at his palatial condo; although he seemed to prefer the CD boombox a friend got him...
Both the Sony and the Tivoli are now instantly quaint; for me certainly, and for the rest of you only in a little while. ... I couldn’t throw them away — or numerous technological junk I plan to have buried with me — but their utility is coming to an end. ... Actually it’s reminiscent of previous hi-fi scammery: the LPs were the finest quality music on the earth — except if you recorded a new LP onto a cassette, whereupon the cassette was instantly higher quality than the LP because it would never get noisy or scratchy or skip which was, of course, absolutely normal for LPs. ... It’s true the manufactured cassettes were generally lower-quality than the LPs; another deep secret kept from us assiduously. ... Later, I don’t think anybody believed that CDs sounded worse than the sacred LP, although it’s an item of faith still in some wacko circles. ... With the CDs, the music industry got its act together; the real problem with the cassettes was they were better and cheaper. The CDs were uniformly more expensive than LPs — not of course due to any kind of collusion — and as a result the music industry has reached the towering level of success it knows today....
But the MP3s are much cheaper, and so some hapless propagandists have tried to insist they sound cheaper. My experience is exactly the opposite, and with extremely poor program material — my own! ... And QXR undoubtedly sounds better than it ever did — at least here, but probably almost everywhere — at http://www.wqxr.org/q2/.
But
then the menacing and glorious LOL got me
internet radio. ... She also informs
me that the blueray player people —
you
know, the super high-resolution video players you’ve been just dying to purchase, in such vast numbers?
— will, as a special treat very soon now, jigger their
products to
play internet content
— from your wifi; just like the Squeezebox plays music; from my wifi.
... This is so much better 
than doing it with your computer without a
stinkin’ box because. ... Well, maybe, because at least in the
case of video, the manufacturers and movie makers have colluded to
copy-protect everything so absolutely thoroughly and completely that no one can play the stuff! ... And now,
with their help, you can participate in the same sort of thing using
the internet!
... Ah brave new world! ... For music, anyway, the Squeezebox radio is
much smaller than
the derelict vista laptop I was using; and it only adds a single
proprietary advertisement to the qxr stream now and then that I don’t
get with the computer....
Sadly, the days of copy-protected music have collapsed, since Itunes abandoned the stuff. ... I can almost feel Logitech gritting their teeth, as they forgo enormous “value-added” profiteering which would only make their box even more ridiculously non-competitive to the odd wandering netbook. ... Speaking of which, the thing depends on squeezebox.com or something, and the minute a bright shiny thing distracts the crack technical marketeers over there at Logitech — le radio ce finé. ... So far they’ve required an email address to do anything with the unit, and then informed me in their email I had 30 days to register. ... The threat wasn’t qualified, and when I clicked their link there were no further extortion attempts — although they did threaten to “contact” me in 30 days, to make sure my experience was good or something. ... But, seemingly, just another pitiful portal languishing in the dust of history — with, to be sure, many wonderful treats I could sign-up for, if only I could shake this pesky frontal lobe problem....
The squeezebox user interface is as usual in this kind of proprietary thing inferior to practically any shareware/free program you might find. But after 3 or four tries + screaming I managed to enter my wifi password and then, fighting through the menus, I found “local”, which did indeed display FM frequencies for numbers of NYC-area stations including 105.9 for my beloved QXR. ... Although I at first accidentally picked the avant-garde “Q2” stream, pretty-much standard piano-falling-downstairs stuff — since it was annotated as being at 105.9 stupid me! — but in the end it worked! ... As long as squeezebox.com does presumably.
So sad. I retired the eager but stupid thing 4/30/10. ... Not because the interface was so user hostile. ... No, because the stupid thing can’t play music without falling over. I think what it objects to is how we turn off our wifi at night, to at least impede the terrorists a little. But who knows? It seems to work if I reboot — unplug the power supply and plug it in — or at least it has done that a few times. I know they’ll hate me over at Logitech, but I feel a table radio you have to reboot ... well, it’s just not right. ... This after several annoying download updates which didn’t seem to improve anything. ... I guess the bright shiny thing has turned-up sooner rather than later. ... So I will take it upstairs to join many retired amplifiers; and it does after all have a fine monophonic tone, loud and punchy....
And then after a few days, QXR disappeared! ... I railed and cast aspersions — and the radio — at the LOL, who patiently plugged it in and discovered the playful web-supported software had changed QXR from 105.9 in the helpful user-friendly menu to 9-something.3 something — the frequency of the “ownership” WNYC, see? ... I mean, that makes sense, eh? ... And is yet another reason the internet radio is so superior to one of those tired old waves-in-the-air thingeys: it’s software based! ... So features and operations can be changed randomly! ... Of course, the main feature still remains: it gets QXR. ... At least until the next feature enhancement....
So pooh to the naysayers; up the new technology! ... Who knows what the future holds? ... Ever? ... But I have my precious QXR back, a surprising resurrection I treasure, like a fanboy idiot. ... And QXR, Midge Woolsey just informed me, has had its hourly communist news extracted, like a boil! ... So it’s all good!
