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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

What are the knobs for? EQ? that's terrible. Digital room correction can do it almost infinitely better. Balance control? just say no.

And you can't have been talking about tuning controls because that's radio, and why would anyone listen to radio on high quality audio systems today?

So maybe just a big fat volume knob, milled from virgin aluminum, and used a heat sink for the non-existening heat production from the non-existent amplifier (it's all in the speakers). Yeah, I can go for that.

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I deeply love my local nonprofit/coop radio stations; the personalities, the history, and the diversity of the music they play all add up to a strong feeling of community. They do stream, but the streams are 128k. I concede the irony of listening to some dj's scratchy 45s transmitted to my middling radio setup by FM in the context of an article about high fidelity audio, but what can I say, I love it, and the sound is part of what I love.

Edit: PS, I also deeply love Ardour and routinely learn a lot from you here and elsewhere. Thanks.

I like radio, especially when I'm working on the PC containing digital media. Have a top-end Yamaha tuner from the 90s that I paid $15 for at the thrift shop. It's actually sort of disappointing in knob feel, but it pulls signals better than other tuners I've tried.

> why would anyone listen to radio on high quality audio systems today?

I do, it was useful when I had flakey internet and the habit stuck. Analogue FM sounds a lot better than the “compressed to buggery and probably in mono” tone of DAB as well in my opinion. There’s also the aesthetic factor, I’m a huge fan of glowing dials and physical analogue controls.

Speakers with built-in amps are cheap, noisy and generally low quality.

Funny enough, the art of setting up a good stereo system (using said knobs) seems to have been lost.

Probably because few can afford more than a closet these days (and good headphones are cheap).

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