I hate radios with dials.

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Digital radios are better. Often if I'm listening to a radio that has a dial on it, I don't know what radio station I actually have it on. Often times, it has turned out that it wasn't the radio station I intended it to be on.

I've probably used two dial radios in my life, and they are unbelievably annoying to use. I'm talking about those old wooden kinds that have the little arrow pointing to impossibly small numbers that are nearly incomprehensible.

I'm so old that for more of my life so far than not, dial radios were all there was, lol! It was all I grew up knowing, so I don't remember really having problems with them. You just had to finesse the turning of them. And you just learned by heart, visually, where on the dial your favorite stations were; it was just a familiarity process.

Sometimes it could be actually very interesting what could be found between the stronger signal stations -- I actually enjoyed moving the dial into weak signals where something really odd or interesting could be heard; things in a language I couldn't identify, music that never got named, even police radio frequencies!

You don't get that with digital pre-set stations. It's nice and convenient now to have digital stations you don't have to worry about, but all that interesting serendipity is lost now.

in my experience, only the highest-quality dial analog radios had accurate frequency indications on the dial, many were wildly off by at a megahertz or more. what that meant for me is that i'd have to wait until a station ID to be sure i had the right station.

I love radios with dials, especially the ones from the 30s and 40s.

I used them before & tuning was kinda a pain. It was hard for me to get it exactly rite where the station would come in good.

Well, I read an article the other day which predicted that America will soon be going the same route as Europe in terms of radio broadcasts. Soon it won't be voices being carried through the air to your set, but primarily binary code. I find that kind of sad, to be honest. I recognize that digital radio might be superior in terms of sound and accessibility, but analog radio is one of my special interests.

i use an HD radio, that stands for Hybrid Digital which is a digital signal hidden in the sideband noise of a standard stereo AM/FM broadcast. it gives me near-CD quality sound with none of the usual analog reception ails such as multipath and noise/distortion. and it has only multifunction push/dials.