3 or 4 64kbps HD Radio channels wouldn't sound that bad in my opinion but is HD Radio ever gonna have more than 96kbps?
Yes. When FM goes all digital, I suspect there'll be more than three times the current bitrate available!
Hmmm. Which will be around the same time as when pigs fly.
3 or 4 64kbps HD Radio channels wouldn't sound that bad in my opinion but is HD Radio ever gonna have more than 96kbps?
It already does. The extended hybrid mode (which all current transmitters and receivers can support) adds four extra partitions to the digital sidebands and allows for 120 kbps total bitrate.
Something we noted when driving around in Extended Hybrid mode, was around reflective structures like overpasses and tall buildings closer to the site, the radio in the rental car was struggling more with reception of the analog portion of the signal. After changing the exporter settings to standard HD configuration, we re-drove that area and the analog signal was much better. Near as we could tell, the SDR tuner in the rental car was interpreting the closer-spaced digital carriers as noise, causing the tuner to mute or go into stereo blend mode.