AM radio being removed from cars

Cafe Society
1

Lets be clear, the AM part of a car radio is only a couple chips. The radio still needs a FM section, pre-amp and output amplifier. I used to repair car radios. A quick Google finds a NTE1624 chip that includes AM/FM and a power amp in one chip. Amazon sells that chip for $8.83.
Link https://www.amazon.com/NTE-Electronics-NTE1624-Integrated-Circuit/dp/B008BYIQOE

I think the greed to remove AM and save a couple bucks in IC chips is appalling.

It’s true finding any decent programming on AM is challenging. Locally it’s mostly religious or talk radio. Are the clear channel AM stations still cranking music for night time interstate travelers?

The average cost for a new car is almost 50k. Does it bother you they are dropping an inexpensive feature?

Link New Car Prices Rise Closer to Average of $50,000 in 2022 | Money

Originally a Washington Post article.
Link MSN

2

What’s next? Are they going to discontinue the telegraph?

Use your favorite podcasting software to listen to obscure radio programs, your favorite streaming service to listen to music.

Sound quality will be better, you will be able to pause or replay content- even the free tiers will have less commercials than over the air radio.

3

Electric vehicles (EV’s) cause too much interferance with the AM signal, a separte expensive filter is required for AM to work in an EV. New makers of EV’s would prefer that you subsribe to streaming services, since they can make money off of them and remove the exterior antennas from the vehicles becasue they not only look cooler without them, they are much less expensive.

But, the government is concerned about emergency broadcasting that is typically done over AM radio due to it’s large range compared to other methods of broadcasting. During a hurricane, flood, atomic blast or whatever AM may be the only media capible of getting the messages out. Cell phone services may be down in such emergencies and people may be living out of their cars and actually needing information, so some other system needs to be implimented.

4

So AM radios will sound even worse than they did before and the cars have FM and cell communication and various music media players available. And some AM radio stations will go out of business. Some of them ought to because of their content, but even the charming AM music stations that evoke memories and feelings from the best years of my life may now disappear? Well, sorry about that but why should the car makers care? AM was an early form radio broadcasting that has always limited quality of sound and been susceptible to EMI. It had a cost advantage for the receivers for a long time but as you notice it’s not really a cost issue anymore. That then leaves car makers with a feature that doesn’t work well and customers aren’t asking for. The charging sockets they provide don’t work as cigarette lighters anymore, and I don’t miss starting my car with a crank. I’ll get over this too.

5

I haven’t taken any long trips in years.

Are the road hazard still AM? The signs used to indicate what frequency.

6

Greed? Lol. Why do you assume that it’s greed? Almost no one uses it. Why the fuck should tens of millions of people a year pay for a feature that’s almost universally unwanted?

7

I think of standard car radios as a fixed design. Factories spit them out by the hundreds of thousands. I doubt the wholesale cost to Ford is more than $25 on a vehicle that sells for almost 50k.

It’ll cost significantly to retool the factories with a different circuit board.

Electric vehicles offer a challenge with circuit shielding. I’m not familiar with electric vehicles and how badly they screw up electronics. I’m surprised cheaper cell phones can get a signal inside a electric car.

8

Whatever the wholesale cost of a radio module they will pay just as much for the one without AM. They don’t want to support something most customers don’t want, and the ones that do want it will complain about interference. I knew a guy who had an old truck with no radio. Know what he did? Bought what we called back then a ‘transistor radio’, a small battery operated radio that he kept in the truck. I’m sure you could find one that you could plug into the thing that’s not a cigarette lighter.

9

Do the circles even touch in that Venn diagram?

10

It’s reasonably common if you listen to sports radio or news. Most of those types of stations only exist on AM in this market (Chicago), though at least one is simulcast (WBBM news) on FM. According to the latest Nielsen ratings, there are two AM radio stations in the top 10 here, one at #4, the other at #9.

https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2023/05/01/chicago-radio-ratings-march-2023

For whatever reason, the station in the headline is not shown on that chart, but they’re (The Score) #15, and also an AM station.

11

You have no idea what you’re talking about. At all. They redesign the radios all the time for many reasons and at some point took out the AM radio part when they were redesigning anyway. Very obviously they wouldn’t do it if the cost was significant.

12

AM radio is probably the simplest type of radio transmission, and because it is so simple, it has inherent noise issues. AM stands for Amplitude Modulation, which means that it encodes the signal by changing the “amplitude” of a fixed frequency (i.e. how “loud” the signal is). To decode AM, you simply filter off everything except that frequency then basically track the peaks of the signal. This means that anything on the same frequency or close to it gets mixed in with your decoded signal. There is no way to differentiate out the noise.

The bandwidth allocations for AM are also rather narrow. You want good hi-def audio? Not with AM. The bandwidth is too narrow.

Because of all of these technical limitations, most radio stations switched to FM in the 1970s. FM is frequency modulation, so it encodes the signal by changing the frequency. To decode it, your decoder just tracks the frequency changes. The decoder is going to lock on the strongest signal in that frequency range, so it will naturally block out less powerful noise signals. The bandwidth allocated to FM radio is also much wider, so you can get much better sounding audio (and in stereo!). So basically, as radios got better to the point where you could easily hear the difference, everyone moved the heck away from that crappy AM stuff.

By the 1980s, the FCC was starting to look at what could be done with AM radio, because it was basically a bunch of dead frequencies that could be better served by allocating them to something else. But then in the late 1980s and early 1990s, talk radio and sports broadcasting really took off on AM radio, and the FCC abandoned their plans to toss existing AM stuff into the trash can and give the frequencies to something else.

Now with satellite radio, AM is once again dying. It’s not quite dead yet, but it’s not exactly healthy. As was said upthread, EVs make a lot of electrical noise, and there is no way to filter off that noise on AM radios since some of that noise is going to be on the same frequency as the AM signals. So if AM radio is going to sound crappy at best, it’s hardly used at all these days, and it’s going to sound even worse due to all of that EV noise, why keep it?

Because AM radio is so crappy, the FCC did allow AM stations to simultaneously broadcast using digital signals and digital compression to improve the signal quality. The encoding and decoding of digital signals also bypasses all of the noise, so you end up with a proper noise-free signal back out of it at your radio receiver. Finally, a couple of years ago, the FCC allowed AM stations that were using digital simulcasting to drop the crappy sounding analog portion of their signal and broadcast only in digital.

So there is a solution for the crappy signal problem, but there aren’t many stations using it.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that car manufacturers are dropping AM. Aside from some resurgence in the late 1980s and early 1990s for sports and talk radio, it has long been a dying format. As far as I am aware, sports and talk radio still make it popular enough that the FCC isn’t considering abolishing it altogether, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if AM radio completely disappears in the next decade or two.

There were quite a few car radios that didn’t have AM in the 1980s, so it’s not like this is anything new.

13

It’s a conspiracy.

14

Top among broadcast radio maybe but what percentage of people listen to broadcast radio that don’t stream the station? If a significant number of people wanted AM radio over the airwaves (not streaming or satellite), it would be in cars.

15

My mother’s 1972 car didn’t have a radio or a tape player. Its spartan interior also didn’t have reclining seat backs, and the windows were not tinted. I don’t think she bought it as an emergency shelter, but as a vehicle to get from point A to point B and hopefully back to A.

16

I dunno. Anecdotally, I know several people that always have the Score (AM sports station) on when I hop into their vehicle. Or certain businesses that have it or some AM talk show on the radio. And I know I listen to AM radio in the car maybe 10-15% of the time. I’ve never streamed AM radio, and I’m not even sure if all those stations have streams or not.

Just adding it up, it looks like of people listening to radio, 15% are listening to an AM station, adding up the Nielsen ratings. Overall, I suppose it’s not that significant, but it ain’t nothing either.

17

AM has been dropped from lots of radios for a long time now. I just looked at a small radio/cd player “boom box” I picked up somewhere because they were giving it away and it worked as a Bluetooth speaker. No AM.

18

Are there Venn diagram symbols to indicate circles with diameters decreasing over time?

19

I remember when FM was a add on feature. :smile:
Radio Shack sold a convertor box that allowed the standard AM car radio to receive FM. I added one to my first car.

AM/FM radios were a option well into the 1970’s. It was a relief when they were finally standard equipment.

I have a lot of great memories of Rock on AM. The local DJ’s were very entertaining. Top 40 AM disappeared while I was in college.

20

My first car was a 1969 Chevy Nova which only had AM and no tape player. My current car is a 2017 Civic. I have never used the radio, only SiriusXM or steaming from a phone. I think it has AM but I’d have to check which I will when I get my lazy ass outside later. It definitely doesn’t have a CD player.