Why are AM radio receivers so rare nowadays? Lots of consumer stereos still have FM but no AM, phones as well...

Sound quality is better than FM and most internet radio streams.

Imagine your eyes are the receiving part of the radio, AM is like trying to identify the different brightness of a single colored light(Amplitude), where FM you identify the different colors of light(Frequency). If there are any interference e.g. bushes in the way/fog/distance, it is easier for you to differentiate color than brightness.

Many are ultra low bitrate so they can jam in sub-channels and offer additional content in the same frequency spectrum. Passable for talk, nightmarish for music.
Digital signals are simply much weaker than analog, any number of factors can impact your reception tremendously. That said, a pair of headphones isn't much of an antenna for any radio.

Buy a Tecsun, the R9012 is like $20 and has great AM reception. Spend $50-$100 and you'd be golden.

What is on AM radio that is actually worth listening to?

News, talk, foreign language programming mainly. Really depends on what you're into, and where you are.

>Many are ultra low bitrate so they can jam in sub-channels and offer additional content in the same frequency spectrum. Passable for talk, nightmarish for music.

Where do you live?

Here in the Netherlands music channels are either 64 kbps or 96 kbps.
Which is fairly decent for AAC+ and, again, better than analog radio.

64kbps is not better than FM, not even close.

Also if you like sportsball, usually its an AM station that broadcasts the games.

Also true. I mostly listen to Shortwave, which is technically 'AM' as well.

Yes it is, by a large margin

It's really not, not even a little.

Yes it is

One of the reasons broadcast radio is so great is the billions of devices capable of receiving it. DAB+ and other digital radio standards will never catch up in that regard.

DAB+ is a failure.
But broadcast radio will be replaced by internet radio within a couple of years.

>The AAC+ codec (used in DAB+) is remarkably good at lower bit rates – still acceptable at 32kbps, but becoming a bit “YouTubey” at 16kbps and horrible at 12kbps. However we feel it still has “something missing” at 56kbps which is the highest bitrate possible for that codec (above that it becomes normal AAC). Unsurprisingly AM sounds the worst, but this is probably exagerrated by the lack of proper AM audio processing which would make a professional AM broadcast sound much better.
a-bc.co.uk/audio-quality-comparison-dab-pcm-fm-am/

It won't, most of the world doesn't have Internet. Radio is the only source of news, entertainment, emergency alerts, etc, for a colossal number of people.

None of those people are worth anything or mean anything to actual important countries though.

I doubt it. Broadcast radio can be received whether you have Internet or not. We have the infrastructure for nationwide broadcast radio, at this point there's no reason not to continue using it. Everyone and their mother has 5 or 10 radios, there's even a good chance your phone has one. Dropping this source of communication is silly to even consider.

The Internet can go down in important countries.

My point still stands. Broadcast radio is going to be here for a long, long time.

>56kbps which is the highest bitrate possible for that codec (above that it becomes normal AAC).

What did they mean by this?

DAB+ is 64kbps or 96kbps AAC+
So better than anything they tried.

Everybody and their mother also has a smartphone.

>most of the world doesn't have Internet.

Dude, even Mbeke beke Africa has internet.

See Also, like I said, there's a good chance your smartphone has a radio.

Objectively false, and a lot of poor people even in the 1st world don't have unlimited data.

Traffic, weather, finance and news. There are music stations as well, but I assume the broadcaster was to cheap to pay for FM.

FM is not digital. There is no way to make a direct comparison and you can increase or decrease bandwidth for higher fidelity.

Most of the world does have Internet access, but just barely
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
>As of June 2017, 51% of the world's population has internet access

Obviously
Not to mention the quality and usability of that access is going to vary widely.

does it have to be ferrite though
a fucking toilet paper roll could easily address that

Using Google pixel 2 here
Went onto the play store, looked up radio, downloaded the first FM and AM radio, Simple Radio.
Tried a Brazil station from SW USA, sounded like shit; tried a Texas station, flawless.
So I'm confused, are you in the middle of the ocean or trying to listen from across one?

My battlestation.
No regrets.

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>I have a tiny DAB+ radio but the reception is utter shit.
>Audio cuts out all the time.
With digital transmission there are three options:
1 - You receive the signal as transmitted (fairly rare)
2 - You receive a signal with errors, but the original signal can be recovered with ECC
3 - The received signal is completely undecipherable
In other words, a small increase in the signal to noise ratio can make a huge difference.

AM only exists to brainwash boomers into right-wing reality tunnels, thank you based manufacturers for making it impossible to listen to

My vintage 1979 Technics does not have this problem, however

Scenic byway information.