I find the Sat Radio broadcasts of acceptable Sound Quality (SQ), even though they have very aggressive compression algorithms, they for some reason sound better to my ears than equivalent mp3/etc examples.
I wonder if part of that is because the Satellites run a path that goes north about 150 miles to my East then turns around and goes south about 150 miles to my west. Reception is never an issue.
It's been too long since I dug into the compression schemes used by Sirius and XM, so I no longer remember the exact details (and don't care to look it up a second time); about all I remember is that Sirius had the higher quality of the two but neither is as high as a 128 mp3.
I don't think you can expect good FM reception in the US NorthWest; even cellular coverage is spotty in many places there. The same would go for the West Coast of Canada.
Where I live it's FM DreamLand as far as the landscape goes; a 60 mile radius circle is fairly common. We have the same uncaring management and chain radio station situation as in the US, but it's mercifully less concentrated. There is no secret to the radio business ... dial up the compression and you cover a wider audience, which improves your rate card, which helps the bottom line. Sound Quality suffers, but the shareholders don't care.
On the other hand we still have CBC FM, which offers excellent music programming, especially at night and on weekends, and the Engineers there still strive for Sound Quality and know how to work a compressor correctly.
For some reason my local market is quite competitive, there are more FM stations here than ever before, in the last few years there have been three new stations getting licensed here.
We do have the problem where one company owns both an AM and an FM station in the same market, but one company can't legally own multiple stations in the same radio band, so there are a half dozen or so players involved.
Sadly the University station shut down but it was able to donate the album collection which goes back to the 1960's to an independent community-supported FM station here, which keeps the commercial ones honest at least. You can't legally resell "white label" records as no copyright fees are paid on them; your options are either a station uses them themselves, or transfers them to another broadcaster free of charge, or destroys them.
There is no Digital Radio FM in Canada, which I love because you can buy a Digital Receiver from the US which will default to analog when the digital signal fails (and it does fail when you move further from the tower) so there is no annoying switching from Digital to Analog and back, and the Analog signal sounds excellent and travels further. I think I paid $30 for the Directed FM Tuner from Amazon Dotcom that I installed in my car.
I find radio invaluable when travelling; you can listen to your choice of software between cities or on long trips but the local radio is a great way to get topical local information, attractions that might be going on, that kind of thing. So I still want both FM and AM in my vehicles, along with a Sirius Sat receiver which is my favourite way to hear and learn about new artists.
I also have some form of full resolution digital audio in vehicles, whether it's a CD player or in one vehicle I have an iPod Classic 160 which stores 16/44 files that are upsampled to 24/96 by an external DAC before making it to the system. So the gamut, depending on what I want from the music at the time. But I still do value the FM radio.
In my truck I have the most elaborate system of all. There is a factory AM/FM/Cassette/CD deck that has been modded so that output is line level (both the volume control and power amp are bypassed). Then there is an old 3rd generation iPod (firewire, so it's 12V) that came with a small HD, that has been hacked so that it's a permanent install, the original HD and the battery has been removed and instead it connects by a couple of adapters to a 500 GB IDE drive (also 12V) with most of my uncompressed music on it. Line Level is taken from the analog out at the Firewire port (not the headphone amp) and sent to the system's preamp where the usual volume control etc and a version of the usual amps and speakers are found.
