Buffalo HD Radio and other Issues

[WJPYFM]

I know many of you or the public don’t care right? With more and more receivers in cars someone may notice HD issues but is it worth calling the station to complain? If I call, who at the station should care? Engineering? PD? Manager? I travel a great distance to work in Buffalo so I have plenty of time to dial around. Why do I care? Because when in HD there is less static/hiss/multipath in the countryside and intermod in the city. Also HD gives additional choice of stations like jazz, AM programming, etc. Cumulus (97rock, 103.3edge, and 104.1classsic hits) refuse to turn HD back on.
I have issues with:
92.9Jack, it just shows buffering and never locks in. I sent a note for them to look at it.
99.5WDCX, the high end has been increased in processing, so high it hurts.
102.5star, analog is much louder than HD and HD is missing midrange. Also HD3 has been dead air for weeks.
107.7Alt Buffalo, HD2 the lake either has out of phase audio in left channel or just buzzes on left channel. Not very listenable. It has been that way forever.

Don’t worry, I have complaints about analog processing on 103.3 Edge too...Shred&Reagan in the morning often distort on their mics and the modulation of the whole station is low. Also for the past week 97 Rock has audio dropouts ever 10-40 seconds.

There I feel better now. I was a station engineer years ago, back when radio was king. This type of stuff was never tolerated back then.

 

[TheBigA]

I was a station engineer years ago, back when radio was king. This type of stuff was never tolerated back then.

Are you a member of AES? There used to be a chapter at SUNY Buffalo. Professional societies usually have a way of reaching the right people.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

Back when you were in engineering, you didn't have 6 transmitters, 4 studios and 10 separate program feeds to keep up with.

 

[davideduardo]

Back when you were in engineering, you didn't have 6 transmitters, 4 studios and 10 separate program feeds to keep up with.

That is manageable as long as there are backup people for when one is working on new gear, on vacation or traveling.

Back when I was CE of my own stations, I had 4 AMs, 6 FMs, 4 STL's and 5 sites including the studio building. I was able to do that and be PD, GM and GSM too. But I think every year took about two years off my life!

A lot of contract engineers handle many more stations, and more and farther separated locations, too.

 

[TVEngineerArk]

102.5star, analog is much louder than HD and HD is missing midrange. Also HD3 has been dead air for weeks.
107.7Alt Buffalo, HD2 the lake either has out of phase audio in left channel or just buzzes on left channel. Not very listenable. It has been that way forever.

This type of stuff was never tolerated back then.

Audio issues with the Entercom stations in Buffalo would never have been tolerated by the Engineering staff back in the day (admittedly my frame of reference is pre HD radio days in Buffalo but it is applicable since I am still a broadcast engineer of both TV and radio). The audio problems would have been found and corrected before anyone outside the department discovered them if at all possible. But knowing the state of Entercom from a fiscal standpoint these days I'm sure whoever is doing their engineering nowadays is doing the best they can to keep their heads above water and the stations on the air.

I currently work as a radio engineer for a mom and pop FM as a sideline to my job as a TV Chief Engineer (mostly because I enjoy it and the station owner is a good friend). In TV the overall quality is more obvious since there is video there for all to see. However, not nearly as many decision makers in radio understand that their product is sound. Good quality audio, while not always openly obvious to advertisers and listeners is nevertheless subliminally obvious. Many audio processing studies have been done and white papers have been written that conclude that annoying sounding or even just bad audio can quickly chase listeners away whether or not the listener knows why they don't like it. When I began with the FM the audio quality was abysmal. The station owner didn't necessarily like it but he didn't know how to fix it and my predecessor was a contractor who focused on keeping the station on the air but not much else. I began to explain to the owner the benefits of making the station sound better in terms he could understand and appreciate. Over the years we made steady improvements and the owner realized the importance of your product having good quality audio that enables a signature sound makes the station sound more professional and advertisers appreciate doing business with a professional whose product brought them results. This, in addition to having compelling content has become a big part of how the station has remained the most successful it has ever been for a number of years now.

 

[WJPYFM]

Yes I have contacts but I don’t think other engineers enjoy phone calls/emails to say hey your station sound has issues could you fix it? Is it so crazy for someone that works forthe station to listen to the broadcast and send email to engineering? Maybe I am just old and thinking wrong. The new way is as long as the stream is ok everything is good. Nobody listens to the radio and even less listen to HD right?
JackFm fixed their HD buffering issue. Audio on 97rock is not dropping anymore. 102.5 HD3 has audio again.

 

[spt87]

Back when WBEN was simulcasting on 107.7 and it was in HD I recall the sync was off between analog and HD so every time it flipped between the two it either skipped backward a couple seconds or forward a couple seconds. So this is nothing new for it to not get the attention it needs (from Entercom in Buffalo anyway).

As much as I like to fool with some of the enhancements made to AM and FM radio over the years including RDS, HD and AM Stereo, streaming online is the focus of the industry. iHeart app., radio.com, Alexa, etc. is where all the emphasis and promotion is. I have mixed feelings about that as over the air radio has a simplicity and reliability to it that are hard to beat (from the end user side anyway).

HD seems to be repeating the arc of AM Stereo, by the time receivers began to really penetrate the market, especially in cars, the radio industry had moved on to the next shiny thing. It took a good 20 years for FM Stereo to really get in a majority of cars (even in the early to mid 1980's AM only radios were still standard in many cars) but the patience doesn't seem to exist anymore (or maybe it can't since the world seems to move faster now).

For stations, HD radio costs money in an on going way for technology license fees and if it comes time to upgrade the HD exciter, it may be a place to cut costs - especially to put $$ toward streaming which has music licensing costs. In some cars radio is becoming an after thought to the newer, shiner options which doesn't help. Some electric cars don't offer AM I've heard due to noise issues so that makes streaming pretty important for those stations. Yes, I know AMs simulcast on FM HD2's and HD3's but my experience is it drops out a lot - more than streaming on my phone.

Once last comment about HD sounding better - the noise floor is lower but I've noticed a lot of these HD radios have analog sound quality that is not what it could be. Call it a conspiracy or just a lack of focus on analog vs HD but I can get better analog AM and FM sound quality on units that were designed specifically for that purpose (aka older car radios). So yes on that radio in HD it sounds better but on my older radio the analog only radio analog sounds like the HD on the HD radio.

This is not just a small market thing either - a lot of the big Entercom AM's have recently dropped HD from what I've read - WINS, WCBS, KYW, WPHT, etc. FM's that have not put it in yet probably won't and there are some FM's that have dropped it.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

Yes I have contacts but I don’t think other engineers enjoy phone calls/emails to say hey your station sound has issues could you fix it? Is it so crazy for someone that works forthe station to listen to the broadcast and send email to engineering? Maybe I am just old and thinking wrong. The new way is as long as the stream is ok everything is good. Nobody listens to the radio and even less listen to HD right?
JackFm fixed their HD buffering issue. Audio on 97rock is not dropping anymore. 102.5 HD3 has audio again.

False. I lived in NW PA for 4 years... and i had regular contact with engineers across NW PA and Western NY.. or contact with people who knew them.. all appreciated it when i said "hey, you might wanna check out". it was never me criticizing or picking at them.. it was simply "hey, when scanning the dial, i happened across this". When you have in some cases.. dozens of transmitters as one engineer had, you cant keep an eye on them all.

 

[SirRoxalot]

HD radio will survive primarily as delivery system (or excuse for) translators carrying HD2 and HD3 streams. The analog to digital conversions - and digital to analog on the receiver end - create latency, which is why HD is out of sync with an analog signal. Engineering has to delay the analog signal - making true on-air monitoring impossible in the studio - if the analog and digital signals are going to be in time as receivers switch back and forth.

There are ongoing experiments with all digital broadcasting. The advantage is that sketchy signals can still deliver good audio over a greater distance. The downside is that the audio pretty much drops off the table as the signal fades. With a good AM signal, the audio can be stereo and near FM quality. As the signal fades, some systems deliver lower quality audio by relying on fewer samples per second.