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“HD did worse than ever,” according to Pew.

Depite Strubie's braying and bragging about how wonderful HD radio is doing now with all those cars getting HD radio this year, Pew injects a little realism into his unfounded optimism and hype:

"It found fewer stations broadcasting in digital "HD Radio" than the previous year – 2,048 in December 2012, down from 2,103 the previous year. That’s based on the Pew analysis of BIA data, and it deals with the number of stations, not actual listening. But the Pew research is pretty tough on HD Radio, saying it failed to entice listeners away from satellite, for example. 2012 was the first year since 2004 that “more stations dropped their HD signal than adopted the technology.” See the “Audio” section of the Pew study – prepare yourself for some unpleasant news"

See more at:

http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/audio-digital-drives-listener-experience/
 
What a cluster-f. Now that many new cars are coming with HD radio as standard, they should be upgrading to max out their HD facilities, not turn them off. This is the time to make it work, and the stations are giving up.

I know everyone here thinks HD is a joke, but in this case the stations are the ones botching this experiment, now. This is like when iPods exploded in popularity, all the sudden radio felt the ground underneath shift and their response was so completely wrong it was laughable (they invented "Jack FM" and became exactly like what they were trying to compete with, giving people more reason to stop listening, because who wants to hear someone else's iPod on shuffle when you can have your own?)

Sometimes I think it's radio itself that's digging its own grave, not the competition.
 
I have it in my car. I seldom use it. FM sounds fine; the difference in perceived sound quality is marginal.

The real problem is all those sub-channels and nothing new, more, different, better I want to listen to. People didn't buy FM radio until broadcasters started programming FM. Program the sub-channels and people will buy HD for the content (if not the sound quality).

This board is full of comments from people complaining about the lack of one format or another in their markets. Give them the formats they want and maybe - just maybe - they'll buy HD. If not, they'll go to Internet Radio (if they haven't already).
 
With rent, taxes, insurance,power bill, payroll, etc. I can justify cutting a checks(s) for a new transmitter, plus a user fee for HD. No thanks.
 
FredLeonard said:
I have it in my car. I seldom use it. FM sounds fine; the difference in perceived sound quality is marginal.
Click to expand...

I agree with your sound quality opinion - HD has no measurable (by the human ear) improvement over analog FM at least to me.

But in my market a couple of the HD signals have content that is missing from the analog FM's and that is the reason my car radio is always on an HD signal.
 
Zach said:
What a cluster-f. Now that many new cars are coming with HD radio as standard, they should be upgrading to max out their HD facilities, not turn them off. This is the time to make it work, and the stations are giving up.

I know everyone here thinks HD is a joke, but in this case the stations are the ones botching this experiment, now. This is like when iPods exploded in popularity, all the sudden radio felt the ground underneath shift and their response was so completely wrong it was laughable (they invented "Jack FM" and became exactly like what they were trying to compete with, giving people more reason to stop listening, because who wants to hear someone else's iPod on shuffle when you can have your own?)

Sometimes I think it's radio itself that's digging its own grave, not the competition.
Click to expand...

I would say that until the big automakers adopt HD as standard, the public won't get exposed to it. Which, in its present form, is a GOOD thing. I will elaborate below. What you have now is more than a dozen auto makers, but they are all small. The aggregate total is probably pretty good, but you don't have a FM, Ford, or Chrysler putting HD standard in the dash. A lot of the smaller auto makers offer it, but it isn't standard, or is combined with everything else that competes with HD.

I don't think it is a joke. I own several HD radios and make use of them. Not a joke, really, but a tragedy - caused by bad engineering right from the start. I tried to introduce my sister-in-law to the technology the other day, she rode with us while I had HD radio on the oldies - like a lot of Houstonians, she is a disenfranchised oldies fan, who now pretty much drives with the radio OFF. I thought maybe HD radio would give her a way to hear oldies again, there are two oldies channels in Houston on HD-2. Drop out after drop out, dead silence because there is no fall back for HD-2's, and after a few minutes she was asking me to put it on satellite. Another potential HD buyer turned off by HD dropouts. I know exactly why - 93.7 is a highly rated Houston station, and it shouldn't bother KRBE 104.1 because it is 10.4 MHz offset. Protections in place for 10.6 and 10.8 MHz completely protect 104.1, but if somebody drives past and their radio is tuned to 93.7, even if they don't have an HD radio - their local oscillator knocks the HD out on 104.1. If that car happens to be behind, in front, or beside you in heavy traffic, it is a long term blackout of HD-2.

The geniuses who dreamed up this system should have known! But they glibly ignored the first adjacent interference they were causing, not realizing it also made HD vulnerable to dropping from stations 10.4 to 11 MHz away. It would have been far better to blow away RDS, SCA, and reading for the blind at 92 MHz - all functions done better by HD anyway - and put the sidebands within the existing channel. They made AM drop extended frequency response and C-Quam to run HD, they should have done the same with those little used auxiliary services on FM. But they didn't, and we are left with a kludgey unreliable system that is an embarrassment to the industry. We don't need to be demonstrating this turkey to people if we want it to be adopted more widely, because it isn't flying.

Understand - KRBE is a full class C station - 100kW ERP off a 2000' tower over flat terrain. I can literally see the towers 20 miles away. But all it takes to wipe out HD is the car next to you to be tuned to 93.7. And it happens a lot. BAD engineering, BAD decisions made up front = defective system that doesn't work in common real world listening scenarios. Time to pull the plug and take losses before it gets worse. GM, Ford, and Chrysler can spot an engineering disaster when they see it. HD isn't ready for prime time, it never was. When it inevitably goes under, I'll have orphan HD radios just like I have orphan C-Quam radios now. Thank goodness they are also capable of analog reception, because that is all that will be eventually available. I will miss the HD-2 formats. But arrogance has doomed HD radio to eventual failure. It didn't have to be that way.
 
rbruce, well said! Folks like Zach, who still believe in HD, don't realize that many of us who regularly trash HD on this board would have liked to see it succeed, but no amount of great programming, side channels, investment, and promotion can cover up the plain fact that HD Radio is junk science . . . BAD engineering. No matter how wonderful the cargo, the truck is an oil-burning, gas-guzzling, dangerous, sputtering rust-bucket. Struble throwing the occasional coat of paint over the rust makes it even worse.
 
I've been called everything on this board, and "Luddite" is one of the more polite terms. But believe it or not, I am in the same boat as LO and rbruce. When we applied to the FCC for our 20kw upgrade in 2004, we actually generated "coming soon" sales pieces for WYSL bragging not only about an eightfold increase in power but also the looming miracle of HD Radio which was going to deliver Antique Modulation into the digital era! I was absolutely an eager, early believer.

Then - belatedly - I started doing my homework.

Uh-oh!!! :eek:

Slowly horrible truths started arriving on my doorstep, one after another. Once I got a good look at the technical specifics of the system, the horror of WBZ being next door dawned on me. I'll never forget driving the 13.2kw spanking-new critical hours signal around the Rochester metro a couple of weeks before 24-7 rollout of AM-HD in late August 2007, listening to the crescendo of buzzsaw adjacent-channel noise washing in, obliterating our powerful local signal. I knew our 500-watt DA-N wasn't going to have a chance. Initially, I had wanted this thing to work!
 
local oscillator said:
rbruce, well said! Folks like Zach, who still believe in HD, don't realize that many of us who regularly trash HD on this board would have liked to see it succeed, but no amount of great programming, side channels, investment, and promotion can cover up the plain fact that HD Radio is junk science . . . BAD engineering. No matter how wonderful the cargo, the truck is an oil-burning, gas-guzzling, dangerous, sputtering rust-bucket. Struble throwing the occasional coat of paint over the rust makes it even worse.
Click to expand...

I actually took a graphic of a station's HD spectrum plot, and graphically overlaid a mirror-imaged version 400 kHz down (as I remember, the sum component from the mixer will be frequency mirrored). Uh-OH! in the ideal world there would be no overlap. But the real spectra do overlap! LSB of the received station overlaps the LSB (mirrored up). Overlap = problems!!!! Even with no overlap, there is still the widened IF response of an HD radio which isn't a brick wall below (and above) the digital sidebands.

In order for the system to work properly, they absolutely have to move the sidebands into the main channel!
 
And it just occurred to me - the driver in the car next to you doesn't even have to have an HD radio, the mixer in his radio will broadcast the sidebands in the sum component. There is no bandpass filtering on the sum component from the mixer. The sidebands will mix at their full power! And an HD station 10.4 MHz below an HD station will produce mixer components from 10.2 to 10.6 MHz, while the HD station you are receiving will produce a difference mixer signal 400 kHz wide from 10.5 to 10.9 MHz, giving an overlap of 100 kHz! There is the dropout problem - right there.

Defective engineering!!!!!
 
Let me do this right ----

KRBE 104.1, HD, so the channel is 400 kHz wide. That means 103.9 to 104.3 MHz.

KKRW 93.7, HD, so the channel is 400 kHz wide. That means 93.5 to 93.9 MHz.

Car next to me tunes to 93.7. Local oscillator in the car next to me produces LO, RF, LO-RF = 10.5 to 10.9 MHz, LO+RF = 104.4, but in a 400 kHz bandwidth with HD sidebands, so it would be 104.2 to 104.6 MHz. Therefore, the upper HD sideband of KRBE is interfered with by the sidebands of the mixer output in the radio next to me. Both stations are approximately equal in power, off the same height tower, in the same antenna farm. This also assumes that the radio in the car next to me has little RF shielding over its LO signal - a pretty safe assumption in these days of cost reduction, bad PC layout done by artists instead of engineers, etc. It also assumes a fairly low Q in my car radio's RF stage, which is also a safe assumption. That RF gain stage is there to provide overload immunity and some gain, not much selectivity.

Another scenario - a local 107.5 and 97.1. Abbreviated calculations ---

107.3 to 107.7 received station. Mixer in the car next to me puts out 107.6 to 108 MHz. Another jamming situation, add in 96.5 (another popular local) and you get 107 to 107.4 MHz - doubling the potential for HD dropout.

BAD engineering!
 
I know you've brought up this technical issue before, but for the life of me I can't recreate it.

In fact, here's a picture of two radios, one tuned to WMJY 93.7 while the HD (and analog) are fine on WDLT at 104.1, sitting right on top of the other. (edit: I also tried it turned to WNCV on 93.3; nothing.)

The only way I could override a station on the Insignia was to tune to something out of market weak analog station. And even then, it took tuning to a semi-precise xx.x5 MHz to make it completely disappear. Moving the Insignia away even 6 inches solves the issue. I couldn't get any of our local HDs to drop out.

Is this IF issue unique to car radios or something, or does it matter how weak/strong the lower band signal is? WMJY Biloxi and WNCV Fort Walton Beach are really weak here. I don't have any other stations in local markets that I know of off hand that would fit this IF issue.
 
Zach said:
I know everyone here thinks HD is a joke, but in this case the stations are the ones botching this experiment, now.
Click to expand...

The stations can't possibly botch HD any more than its inventors did, although the infantile, patronizing promotions that the Alliance invented came pretty close. Something that was poorly engineered from the start and doomed by its very design to failure wasn't going to be saved by proper promotion and good programming.
 
Zach said:
I know you've brought up this technical issue before, but for the life of me I can't recreate it.

In fact, here's a picture of two radios, one tuned to WMJY 93.7 while the HD (and analog) are fine on WDLT at 104.1, sitting right on top of the other. (edit: I also tried it turned to WNCV on 93.3; nothing.)
Click to expand...

I first suspected something was up when HD dropouts happened when cars passed me (or I passed them). When you commute, you begin to see the same cars over and over again. And - a lot of times the same cars would cause HD dropout regardless of where along the commute I encountered them. What cinched it for me - the lightbulb moment - was on a nice day when everybody rolled the windows down. I turned down my radio and heard 93.7 playing in the car next to me - one of the ones that caused blackouts. I tuned over to verify they were indeed listening to 93.7. The radius from car radios seems to be no more than 50 to 100 feet of local oscillator broadcasting, which seems to me to be a lot. I don't know what could be different between your home radios and my experience with car radios. But I do know I get dropouts near some houses that are pretty close to the road as I pass by. The stations I am listening to - 93.7 and 104.1 are in the same antenna farm, are 100kW off of 2000 foot towers, in sight of where I drive, probably no more than 20 miles at the most. But the ERP of the station should have nothing to do with the power leaked by the local oscillator of a radio - that amplitude is fixed by radio, and the mixing products by the AGC of the radio. I'm just observing - I've got no agenda here, except I sure love to hear the HD-2 formats and wish they would be more reliable - as the stations primary HD-1 content is totally uninteresting to me. Probably backwards from the way the stations here would want, but I am responsible for my own musical taste (or lack thereof).
 
Well, maybe the Lucent guys should have foreseen the IF problem. Then again, a lot of markets don't have 10.4 or 11 mHz spaced stations, so it may not be a huge issue, though in some places it certainly could be. This problem may fade over time as digital quadrature detection, software defined radios find their way into the market, replacing the standard radios with 10.7mHz IF stages. In a few years it's very likely that almost all receivers will abandon the traditional mixer/IF amps in favor of DSP due to lower cost and superior performance.
 
Let's hope so!

I'd like to point out that rbruces's IF problem in Houston (along with the ever-present self-interference) is a best case scenario for HD. Markets that have level terrain and big Class C's up and down the dial are uncommon, but where HD should be at its best. So, the IF problem almost gets lost in many, many other markets -- especially in Zone I -- where issues of adjacent-channel interference, band-crowding, terrain, and the relative absence of "big" signals" (a handful of grandfathered superpower stations excepted) make HD a technical non-starter. And what HD does to AM is criminal. How an industry can be so self-destructive is beyond my comprehension.
 
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