HN user
One of Dave Rat’s old Red Hot Chili Peppers tour videos/blogs has him putting the channel cards from a very expensive analogue Midas sound desk in a dishwasher to fix them after somebody spilt beer over the desk during a gig. Worked great!
A similar fun trick was used by Aphex Twin (and others) to make a weird face appear in the audio spectrogram of one of his tracks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509105
For reference, most/all BBC radio stations use AKG C414s (https://www.akg.com/Microphones/Condenser%20Microphones/C414...) of various vintages. They sound fantastic and cost ~$700, rather than $3.5k.
BBC Radio 3 uses no dynamic range compression, so might be most comparable to NPR (although it's likely that each local station applies a ton of compression before the signal hits the air).
Most (other) radio stations apply copious amounts of multiband dynamic range compression on their output - with the nickname of "sausage-making", since the process turns waveforms that look like music into waveforms that look like sausages. In the FM days, louder sounding stations were associated with better signals, so got bigger market share...
Not what you asked, but a digital version of the current Real Book does exist and makes common appearances on band stands! https://www.irealpro.com/
I live in Europe now, and I'm fine with high taxation. But for heaven's sake, call a tax a tax.
The BBC is license-fee funded rather than tax funded so that (in theory at least) they don't have to rely directly on the government for funding - private citizens directly fund the corporation.
This goes some way to ensuring more independence, and fairer news output.
In reality, the government holds the BBC to ransom every eight years when the royal charter they operate under is re-written. There will always be claims of political bias on both sides.