The reason I don't have a satellite receiver in my home is because it's lack of fidelity is much more obvious at home where it's quiet.
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“a lot of resistance on the part of some of the automakers”
- Thread starter KB1OKL
- Start date
The reason I don't have a satellite receiver in my home is because it's lack of fidelity is much more obvious at home where it's quiet.
Nope, not a qualification either. And what dropouts? There is exactly one intersection that my HD will drop out and that is adjacent to Scottsdale Air Park. I suspect that interference coming from the air field is the cause because I don't have dropouts anywhere else in the metro area. And I have traveled more than 75 miles outside the metro area and kept the HD signal just fine. Your part of the country may be different so HD may never work for you as well but that doesn't mean it is a scam. And BTW, both analog FM, AM and satellite will drop out when inside the Deck Park Tunnel so none of these technologies is completely immune from dropouts.
Again, your market is different than mine. I love Oldies and right now in my market there is exactly one HD FM translator which simulcasts a local AM Oldies station. If that is all there ever was on HD I would have bought it for that very reason. I also have satt in the same car but the sound is terrible. To my ears FM and FM-HD sound essentially the same so it is the content I listen to. And did I mention my HD is free?
Your criticism of HD sounds a lot like someone living in New England and trying to drive a high-horsepower two-wheel-drive sedan on icy roads. You have to match the product to your environment. I love my 429HP V-8 rear-wheel-drive sedan here in Phoenix but I wouldn't own such a car if I lived in Boston. HD works for me. Satt works for you. Viva la difference!
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I agree but they would get sick of the complaints, ever see all of them in online car lists?
Those complaints have had no effect. They get complaints about Sirius too. They get complaints about lots of things. If they get money, it doesn't matter who complains.
You have it backwards.
Satellite has a classic rock channel, and it is a "one size fits all" same-channel-in-every-market homogenized version. Terrestrial radio has hundreds of stations in each format, but just one or two in each market area. So each station can be tailored for the particular city and region where they operate to accommodate for local tastes.
This is particularly true with CHR stations, where there are considerable differences in local implementations raging from ones with considerable alternative flavors to ones that are highly rhythmic.
Since you are not in the target of a CHR station (unless you are an 18-44 year old female), calling the music "krap" is useless and unnecessary opinion and not factual.
Actually, it has three. Classic Vinyl for late '60s through mid-'70s, Classic Rewind for late '70s through mid/late-'80s, and Deep Tracks for songs from all years that either got little to no airplay when current or got airplay when current but don't test well enough now to make the average terrestrial playlist. CR and CV have playlists around 800 songs each while DT is easily twice that. All three play songs and bands that I don't recall being big in my part of the country (New England), and I'm sure there are other artists played who weren't big elsewhere. You'll probably argue that such an approach introduces too many "bad songs" into the mix, but I'd argue that if SXM didn't do this, people would complain that they weren't hearing enough of their favorites.
It never ceases to amaze me the criticisms of HD radio. And terrestrial radio. And satellite radio. This thread cracks me up. Thanks to whoever thinks HD is only in luxury cars. My Kia Soul loves that. Same for my Sirius. All I need now is the hamsters. I live in a market fairly well devoid of HD channels. We have 2 HD stations. Both cover fairly well and I enjoy NPR from time to time on one of them. I have noticed the sound quality on Sirius ain't all that great, but as a guy who grew up on AM and listens to streaming from time to time, it'll pass. I am amazed at the dedication of people like Bob who have spent a decade of their lives playing whack-a-mole with HD radio here on this board. It is what it is. It's certainly NOT a scam. It's like satellite, which comes along every month to suck the blood out of your bank account. If you don't want it-DON'T USE IT. I like being able to follow some of the programming on Sirius and as long as I can pick it up for $50 for 6 months, I do.
As I read this thread, I feel like the only thing we are missing is some old bastard yelling "Get off my lawn!" When properly implemented, HD, sounds nice. And, to me, carrying the torch for over a decade as an HD hater is just Looney Tunes. Woolworth's went out of business and now they own Foot Locker. Things change. We all need to adapt. People still use HF voice on amateur radio. Doesn't mean I don't have a cell phone.
As I read this thread, I feel like the only thing we are missing is some old bastard yelling "Get off my lawn!" When properly implemented, HD, sounds nice. And, to me, carrying the torch for over a decade as an HD hater is just Looney Tunes. Woolworth's went out of business and now they own Foot Locker. Things change. We all need to adapt. People still use HF voice on amateur radio. Doesn't mean I don't have a cell phone.
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If you would read more carefully you would know that I said "most", not "only".
I know this is getting a wee bit off topic, but I figure you will know the answer better than anyone else: is channel spacing on FM in Mexico the same as in the US? It seems like the success of FM HD depends a lot of how densely packed the FM dial is. It seems in my experience that the Zone II stations tend to perform better at the fringes due to less densely packed adjacent channels. Whereas in New England and the upper Midwest in Zone I things cut out a lot quicker.
For me, satellite's appeal was the niche formats. Having two or three dance channels, the decades channels, some of the other long-since-gone niche channels. But then they ditched most of those beloved channels and re-jiggered the decades channels and gutted them after the merger. I got tired of paying for talk & music that might disappear with little or no advance warning. I can get that for free on terrestrial radio. (It also helped that I'd moved to a very isolated rural town that had its own oldies and FM stations, so the need for satellite was very much negated.)
Back when I had satellite, I also traveled more extensively, but I found plenty of places where satellite did not work at all, or worked too poorly to be of any use. If you are mostly dropout free, it's likely due to a network of ground repeaters. I recall in particular a 20 or 30 minute stretch of I-81 in Virginia where my radio was just completely dead due to a steep mountain ridge right up against the highway. And pretty much all of old town Savannah in Georgia, due to the mossy trees hanging over the roads. Ditto downtown Mobile and Government street, for the same reason. And downtown Vicksburg by the river, where the city is up a hill, making the buildings seem that much taller. I even remember XM cutting out extensively in New York City, their own headquarters at the time. It stayed off the whole time I was crossing the GWB, which seemed odd since it was out in the open. And things may be different now, but I traveled through Ontario and Quebec pre-Canadian XM launch and it was totally useless there as well, especially in the cities.
Of course I've always said that some HD markets are better than others. Most of the FMs in my small market (Mobile/Pensacola) are now running some form of higher power, between 1.5 and 4%. I've had good luck receiving stations from 50 miles out with the portable Insignia radio, with the headphone cable strung up across my car's rear view mirror, which as you can imagine is a far from optimal way to receive low powered FM signals. Birmingham stinks for HD, probably due to terrain. But St. Louis is awesome. LA is not bad, Albuquerque is useless unless you're on the wrong side of Sandia for some reason. And so forth and so on.
I think the radios are finally maturing now, and that may help, too. The newest gen Insignia portable (with the gray cladding) is a bulldog with HD. It bites and never seems to let go. I no longer get tons of dropouts in my area near the TX sites, just the occasional blip due to terrain shadowing or being too close to the transmitter sites. That's a far cry from the performance of the earlier all-black cladded models, which couldn't hold on to HD when in motion for nothin'.
Haha!, thanks Clouseau, long time. I still use voice on HF, AM sometimes even, I have a cell phone too.
There are several good AM oldies shows here in my range at least with my antennas, I listen to one almost daily on my 816K console, sounds great, bass blows you out of the room.
I also have a high horsepower rear wheel drive sedan, approx 400 hp, it's actually good in the snow but I try not to drive it, I drive my medium horsepower rear wheel drive station wagon in the snow. Satellite sound is not that bad, I was just listening to the Real Jazz and it sounded pretty good to me especially in a car
Concerning automakers resistance to HD, I think it has to do more with the consumer. HD seems to lack demand in the top 10 market where I am. There seems to be little awareness among the general public/typical radio listener. Companies tend to have a knee jerk reaction to consumer demand. When the consumers demand it, they provide it. A car salesman I know said he sees little demand for HD and Satellite Radio. It seems neither have done enough promotion to create enough demand, locally at least. Even a group owner Chief Engineer said when one of his HD channels was off waiting on parts, it took almost a week before they got a call from a concerned listener. That was a couple of years ago so I doubt it is that way today, but it sure made you think the extra dollars were being wasted.
I think this is an old premise. Back when IBOC/HD was introduced, it was only available via aftermarket radios, Kenwood and JVC being the first. Granted the roll-out HD/IBOC has taken significantly longer than satellite radio, which had auto manufacturers as strategic and business investors, most high end cars now have HD Radio as standard equipment. Just over the past two months when shopping for my wife's new car; Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Maserati, Lincoln, Cadillac, and (what my wife bought) Jaguar, all have HD standard in their cars. Heck, my sister's new Kia even has HD radio standard.
So if HD is so irrelevant and manufacturers resistant to installing HD capability in their vehicles, why is there are a growing list of manufacturers including it in their cars? Nobody is holding a gun to their head.
So if HD is so irrelevant and manufacturers resistant to installing HD capability in their vehicles, why is there are a growing list of manufacturers including it in their cars? Nobody is holding a gun to their head.
And the factor that many posters miss is that satellite began in a period of relative prosperity, while HD had the brakes put on by the recession. Discounting for that and the fact that automakers have to pay to put HD in each car, I'd say the progress is reasonably good.
When in-depth advertising began in my market it was the CBS stations pushing it and they pushed an improved audio quality above all else. I have never found a single person however that can tell the difference between an analog FM and digital FM signal. They both sound the same. So the advertiser is trying to tell people to spend more money on something that doesn't promote itself.
Lord, everyone I have played HD radio can tell a difference. Except for my own mother, but she has significant hearing loss. They don't necessarily think it's better, though. Just different.
Back when Cumulus still ran HD on their stations in this market, they all had no subchannels and they really sounded fantastic. Not sure if that was up to the encoder itself, or having lossless music put into that encoder instead of mp3s or what. But they all sounded really, really good. Especially compared to the low bitrate audio that iHeart's local stations feed. They sound "digital" even in analog. Very crappy. But of course no one else notices — I must have golden ears.
Speaking of old folks, my parents shopped a while back for a much more modest set of wheels that the makes Kelly listed above, and many of them had HD available, too. I think I spotted HD logos in the Subarus, one VW, a Mazda CX-5 and seems like in one of the Fords they looked at. They weren't exactly shopping the premium level trims, either.
Just as a bit of inside information rather than a criticism of the post:
In the truest sense, there was never any "advertising" for HD on the HD radio stations. The HD Alliance, a group of the major broadcasters* who were also the investors in iBiquity, agreed for each of its members to each provide a certain number of spots per week to promote HD. They used unsold inventory to run the Alliance spots, which were internally created by the Alliance. The first of those was the dreadful "the stations between the stations" campaign.
Further campaigns occasionally included tags for retail outlets that carried HD radios, such as Best Buy.
* Of the investors, only HBC (now Univision) decided not to be part of the Alliance.
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Again: can we get some numbers for these claims? For translators, how about some Nielsen figures and/or revenue examples? (I've asked before about the latter but never got an answer).
And how available are HD receivers in Mexico? What is the adoptive trajectory there among broadcasters? (Keeping in mind that iBiquity does not charge non-US broadcasters a licensing fee).
Just look at any Nielsen report for the call letters that end in -HD and you can see the presence of translators. Good markets to look at are places like Austin, San Antonio, Atlanta. Austin, for example, has 6 shares now going to HD formats that are on FM translators. Atlanta has nearly 5 shares for HD-2 plus translators, with two of them well over the 1 share position in a market with 75 commercial shares.
All of this is, of course, dependent upon actually having any operating translators in a market simulcasting an HD signal.
Share to revenue conversion is a multi-faceted proposition involving the demographics of the programming and the effectiveness of the station's sales staff. As a rule, share and revenue have a close relationship; those who buy based on ratings don't care if the station is a pure FM or an FM based on an HD origination.
The large markets are adopting. For example, Grupo Radio Centro adopted in Mexico City, and this group alone has over 50% of the total audience in that 23,000,000 person market.
It's important to note that the only really salable audiences in Mexico's rated markets is that in the A, B and C+ socioeconomic levels (excluding C-, D and E). These listeners are upper and upper middle class in income and will be buying the same kinds of cars as comparable US consumers.
It's significant to note that whatever Mexico does tends to be emulated across Central America and has influence even into Spanish-speaking South America.
Keep in mind that the iBiquity fees for stations in the US are relatively small.
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Has Mexico allowed higher power HD like the US has? Hopefully they have, and the stations will build to whatever maximum power is allowed straight away, so they skip the "upgrade" issues that keep many US FMs from increasing above 1%.
Several broadcasters in my area are reporting they use between 1.5 and 4% and it's made a huge difference in the reliability of HD reception. I'm also curious about FM channel spacing rules in Mexico, and if they're similar to the US's Zone II spacing requirements. I get the impression the HD is most trouble free in those parts of the US covered by those spacing guidelines.
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