My brother is in his Manhattan office, and he's getting very excited about tonight's Bruce Springsteen concert at Madison Square Garden. It's a pretty cool office - when you're put on hold you hear Miles Davis - but it's still not a workplace where you bring in your beatbox when you want to get pumped up for gig. Happily, the PC on his desk means he can stick a CD in that drive and listen to all the Bruce he likes.
But still, a CD . . . There's nothing like the sense of collective anticipation you get from the radio, is there? So the brother "tunes" his web-browser to WFUV, the public-radio station that operates out of Fordham University in the Bronx - and which might be a struggle to tune in orthodoxly, trapped inside a midtown tower, even if he had that beatbox - and sits at work enjoying the station's mighty mix of Springsteen rarities and classy folk, roots and indie favourites from other artists. Of course, he could do the same thing even if the distance being bridged were more than a borough. You can do it right now (www.wfuv.org).
Technology is changing the world of radio. And unlike television, where the high costs of production mean the increase in "choice" brought about by digitisation effectively means an increase in rubbish, in radio the increase in "choice" might actually mean an increase in choice.
It's not only via the web that the choices will be available, though in Ireland that's as far as we've got for the moment. Digital audio broadcasting (DAB) - in which it's said we're two years behind Britain, and four behind the US - offers broadcasters another opportunity to diversify what we can hear on the radio, with the possibility of many more new stations offering more narrowly targeted programming, as well as text services and even images.
What's more, the DAB sound is said to be CD-quality - in Britain, audiophiles have been the main market for the few thousand high-priced digital receivers that have been sold. (The first portable version has just gone on the market for £800 sterling, though a £200 car radio is promised by year's end.) And since the receiver is a computer that reads a digital signal, interference, even inside an office block, simply doesn't arise. (The technicalities are well explained at www.worlddab.org).
There's nothing "world wide" about the DAB web, however. Broadcasts, which go out in Britain - the BBC stations, Classic FM - at frequencies around 221 Mhz, well above the FM band (in other countries the chosen band is much higher again), have roughly the same range as today's FM.
That means listeners in this State can forget about digital for the moment. "There is no legislation or regulation yet, so we're not broadcasting full-time," says Simon Bolger, a digital radio specialist at RTE. At the moment the State broadcaster is licensed, by the Office of the Director of Telecommunications Regulation, to do test transmissions only.
Although he has nothing yet to show off, Bolger paints an attractive picture of what the new technology has to offer. Six to eight new stations could fill the "multiplex" in the sort of space on the dial now confined to just one. "And the same receiver can receive text, pictures, web pages. A listener to RTE Radio 1's Mystery Train could also look at the screen and see a page with information on the track or a competition the programme is running."
The new receivers allow for some sophisticated channel-surfing, but they don't offer true interactivity, lacking a "backchannel", according to Bolger, "but in three to five years you'll be able to get DAB on your GSM mobile phone, and use it to send in the answer to a competition question".
Audiophiles aside, among the biggest applications could be in providing services such as traffic news: the receiver's screen could display a map showing the trouble spots. Developments of such broadcasts in Britain have been slow, and digital is still a story for the business rather than the media pages, as companies jockey uncertainly for position; many of them gathered for encouragement with UK Culture Secretary Chris Smith for a digital-radio "summit" last week.
Although digital radio is nothing if not local, there has been some concern from local broadcasters in Ireland that it could threaten their position if the State is divided into as few as six regions for digital-multiplex purposes. Under those circumstances, "the local value listeners get today will not be possible commercially", Joe Yerkes, chief executive of Midlands Radio 3, told The Irish Times recently.
The Yerkes image of the digital future sees Ireland's provincial broadcasters forced by increased competition to abandon speech services in favour of lowest-common-denominator music. (Sound familiar, Dubliners?) However, other technological developments in the delivery of radio offer precisely the opposite effect: stations that offer minority-interest programming can reach specialist audiences far beyond the power of a conventional transmitter.
And that's not just the webcasters, some of whom are conventional broadcasters, while others are Internet-only. There's also satellite digital - dubbed XM by one of its developers. In the US, the XM vision involves perhaps 100 new stations, each with a narrow niche market, all available for a set subscription fee, and able to be received equally well in Maine and Montana.
And it's not Futurama stuff: Daimler Chrysler is committed, sticking receivers in its new model cars, and the antenna resembles that on a mobile phone more than it does a satellite dish.
Meanwhile, back on the desktop, the web offers immediate - though definitely not CD quality - access to literally thousands of radio stations, with live "streamed" transmissions as well as archive material. Free downloadable software is all that's needed to start listening. Sites such as web-radio.com offer directories to what's on offer, while the likes of myplay.com and sonicnet.com allow you to customise your own station - though that lacks the human touch.
All things considered, with Internet-access costs likely to drop dramatically here, web radio, as much or more than digital radio, clearly offers a potential threat to today's analogue broadcasters.