Where are you? Do you know what your FM is doing?

Seattle: If I were being really generous, I'd say there is one jazz station (KPLU) and one classical station (KING-FM) in the greater Seattle area with decent to good FM reception. Both stations, however, program middle-of-the-road material.

There are a few FM stations that do somewhat more adventurous programming (the college radio stations mostly), but they are all low-power, fairly low fidelity broadcasters. The remainder of the stations are crap.

I could not, in good conscience, recommend to anyone in Seattle that they invest in a high-quality FM tuner.

Boston is incredibly blessed with a great, crowded non-commercial dial end. My faves are WGBH (especially for its live feeds!), WBUR (although it's become too talky), WUMB (U Mass Boston, for its fine folk programming), and of course WHRB (Harvard, for their days-long all-classical orgies!). My wife loves WERS (Emerson College) for its all-a capella and Broadway shows programming on the weekends.
An old NAD Monitor Series receiver has their greatest-tuner-ever in it (better than the new one in their HT receiver), but the non-compressed programming is considerably more transparent with my new Magnum Dynalab MD100.
I DO feel sorry for those who have little access to great radio. It's allowed me to have to read less, though, which is a dear compromise....

Sdcampbell - are you on a hill or in a valley? I used to live in Port Townsend, and there was quite a good array of radio stations available there by the water, including CBC (Canadian) and Bellingham. Any chance of receiving these in Seattle?

Hey Blueswan,
I live in Atlanta also. The Jazz station you are talking about is WCLK, right? It is a great station, I would say one of the best in the country. I bought a Creek T43 almost entirely for this station. It sounds great, sometimes a little hard to get a perfectly clear signal. I live inside of 285, but in a valley.
Cheers.

On the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, an hour east of Portland OR, on top of a 2000' mountain so I can get a lot of stations pretty cleanly. I have my MD Etude on virtually all day every day, for background music while working. Stations are mostly acceptable quality-wise, but you don't listen to FM as a reference-quality source, but rather for the content. We have an excellent private listener-supported classical station, KBPS (www.allclassical.org, can get it off the web with RealPlayer, although I haven't tried it and have no great desire to). This is the first time in my life I've actually contributed to a listener-supported station, as I find the political slant of NPR and OPB to be insufferable. So I would heartily recommend a good tuner if you have any stations nearby that you would enjoy listening to. But "good" doesn't have to mean "expensive"; I previously had a Yamaha TX-950 (which can be had on the used market for around $200) which was surprisingly good in both reception and sound quality. There are many others out there in this price range that will extract most of the quality most FM stations have to offer. As far as going for bleeding-edge quality, if you live outside the major metropolitan areas in most cases it isn't going to be worth it. Maybe you should post your location and see if anyone pops up and offers to loan you their Day-Sequerra for a few days just to see.