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Another failure for HD Radio

OKCRadioGuy said:
'I wonder how badly this thing effects your battery time in your iPhone (or iPod Touch)?' I hear a giant suck'in sound....
Click to expand...

Yeah - HD radios going down the same black hole as Cue Cats.
 
Hey! I still have a brand new Cue Cat. How much is that worth on e-Bay?

:)
 
Slightly off topic, because it doesn't demodulate HD radio, but has anyone on here tried the new iPod Nano and if so, what did you think of the performance of the FM tuner?

They're pretty attractive, and after all, it is that time of the year...

:)
 
Gigawire HD Radio iPod tuner. Review from a new owner:
by bchamp747 November 9, 2009 3:49 PM PST
I purchased this product 2 days ago. In spite of all of the Great Features of HD Radio, this accessory does not measure up!! When the remote is connected to my iPod touch, it does indeed pick up HD broadcasts, but the sound quality is horrific...it's like listening to a poorly encoded MP3 file! Other issues are nominal amounts of background noise and lack of higer volume control!
Click to expand...

Source link:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10393370-233.html

If HD Radio is the future of radio, as widely promoted, then broadcasters are screwed, glued, and tatooed.
 
Yup. The suits are so worried about being digital they'll ruin their analog service with excessive HD power levels and spend tons of cash doing it. The 'HD' audio in many cases is INFERIOR to analog FM quality if a secondary channel is used. Any way one looks at it, the technology is a joke. If they industry leaders were smarter they would have spent the wasted money on TALENT that was worth listening to. The listeners don't care about digital or not. They care if it sounds OK and they programming is right for their taste. The rest is expensive busywork.
 
A local station in Worcester, MA, WSRS 96.1 sounds worse in IBOC than in analog, i directly compared them using different tuners through the same system.
 
One of my contract clients has decided to leave HD turned off until further notice as an economy measure. This particular FM station is running "split level" combining (which offers somewhat better efficiency than high-level), but the power consumption of the solid state linear amplifier (along with three HVAC units needed to remove waste heat from the linear amp and reject load) has more than tripled the electric bill over the past three years. The HD-2 channel produces no revenue, so this is an area where money can be saved without compromising programming.

We will use the original transmitter (a reliable 25 kW tube design) for all analog amplification, bypass the combiner, and retain the solid state transmitter as an analog standby. With such a reduction in heat, the air conditioners will only be needed on warm days in the summer. If HD still appears doomed two years from now, I plan to bias the auxiliary's PA modules for Class C operation, which will improve its efficiency and increase output.

Unless the economy turns around quickly, expect to see more stations taking similar measures in 2010.
 
Play Freebird said:
One of my contract clients has decided to leave HD turned off until further notice as an economy measure. This particular FM station is running "split level" combining (which offers somewhat better efficiency than high-level), but the power consumption of the solid state linear amplifier (along with three HVAC units needed to remove waste heat from the linear amp and reject load) has more than tripled the electric bill over the past three years. The HD-2 channel produces no revenue, so this is an area where money can be saved without compromising programming.

We will use the original transmitter (a reliable 25 kW tube design) for all analog amplification, bypass the combiner, and retain the solid state transmitter as an analog standby. With such a reduction in heat, the air conditioners will only be needed on warm days in the summer. If HD still appears doomed two years from now, I plan to bias the auxiliary's PA modules for Class C operation, which will improve its efficiency and increase output.

Unless the economy turns around quickly, expect to see more stations taking similar measures in 2010.

This makes complete sense. The stations I left in analog a few years ago have been converted (by corporate fiat) to HD. The heat is so intense they had to add a third 5 ton unit to a room with only two operating stations to handle the load. This is for two systems running 10 kW analog (for which a single air handler used to be sufficient with the second working as a backup/switch off) and now running two HD's at 100 watts each with a total of 1800 watts rejected into the room. They are also paying twice the money for two additional ports into the master antenna. For what? And now they're supposed to quadruple the output and reject power? Good luck guys.
Click to expand...
 
Play Freebird did thusly pontificate:

Unless the economy turns around quickly, expect to see more stations taking similar measures in 2010.
Click to expand...

Good! If you are a radio station owner, please consider removing this HD crap off your air, let iBiquity know you are not happy with their product or the amount of money it costs to operate it and offer to sell its encoders back to them. Please save the public from the misery that will ultimately destroy the earliest and most basic form of electronic entertainment and information distribution.

Please do this BEFORE the iBiquity chair manages to convince everyone on Wall Street that IBOC is selling like hotcakes, the public is catching on to and can't live without it, and the company initiates an IPO!

You'll be glad you did!
 
"Before the company initiates an IPO." Sure.

Cal, my friend, don't lose a lot of sleep about this. It's kind of like worrying that it's going to start raining $50 bills before lunch today.
 
I know that I said this before, but I guess this is a good time, as any, to give my .02 about IBOC (iBiquity) broadcasting. As you can see by many posters that they find that the IBOC system is not very effective. It's too expensive to install, too expensive to run, too expensive to pay for the licensing from iBiquity. And frankly, it does nothing to help for the "bottom line". The interference created by IBOC is not helping matters much on both FM and especially on AM. Adding several dB's of IBOC carrier on FM, just to closely emulate analog coverage, is only adding more problems with the analog coverage (especially with first and second adjacent channels). I think IBOC should have not been the "end all" for digital broadcasting. The FCC should have looked further with FMeXtra, the DAB system that uses the existing SCA spectrum that ALL FM stations have. The coverage of FMeXtra digital is very close to FM Stereo. And unlike IBOC, it does not step on first or second adjacents. The sound quality of an FMeXtra signal is excellent, even if you use two separate Stereo streams. And unlike IBOC, the FMeXtra won't break the bank, even for the 10 or 100 watt FM college stations. $20,000 and you're in digital. BUT, the IBOC cartel has pretty much got Carte Blanche with the industry right now. But if IBOC falls flat on it's face (which is entirely possible, given the current economic picture), maybe FMeXtra could get a second look with the Commission for Digital Audio Broadcasting. Who knows?

Hey, if the FCC re-examined CBS Color back in the 50's, maybe the Commission would do the same for IBOC DAB. (One can dream can't they?)
 
So how would that have FMXtra helped AM? It seems to me that if any modulation scheme could use some modernization, it's AM. Or is it that AM needs to just die off with those who grew up listening to it?
 
No, Howard. What AM needs is for the band to stop being bulldozed with high-amplitude interference in the form of adjacent-channel IBOC digital carriers, raising the noise floor and driving away what listeners are left.

If we can banish IBOC from AM we can at least get back to where we were in 2002 before the Wall Of Noise was unleashed. THEN we can figure out where to go from there go improve the band. But first, let's stop trashing it with HD-AM.

HD Radio represented a quantum leap backwards for AM. Everybody knows it. It's beyond dispute.

(IMO any appreciable digital power increase on FM will replicate the interference disaster of IBOC-AM, but pro-HD nitwits still have to prove that to themselves and everyone else. The head-in-sand "the interference won't be too bad" attitude closely parallels the government's demolishing the world economy by granting hundreds of billions in loans to non-mortgage-worthy borrowers. Much in the same way you can't finesse laws of economics, neither can iBiquity, the Alliance and HD-pushers use Hollywood Accounting to bend the laws of physics to somehow persuade signals not to interfere because "they're digital, after all.")
 
HowardMBurgers said:
So how would that have FMXtra helped AM? It seems to me that if any modulation scheme could use some modernization, it's AM. Or is it that AM needs to just die off with those who grew up listening to it?
Click to expand...

I'll answer that question. AM can do a lot more than it is doing right now. Prior to NRSC filtering (prior to the mid 80's), AM showed a lot of promise with AM Stereo. The AM Stereo radios were beginning show up in the stores and music formats were widely available. The FCC made a BIG blunder by not choosing an AM Stereo standard, and KEEPING a standard (Magnavox) in the first place. By the time the FCC chose the "de facto" standard (C-QUAM), the damage had been done. The NRSC filtering destroyed any possiblity of AM being a high-fidelity medium. Knocking out any audio above 10 kHz and introducing a new "pre-emphasis" curve pretty much did it for AM. The AM radios out there right now are horrible in terms of frequency response and overall quality. And now with IBOC, the average IBOC AM station sounds no better than the best "POTS" line (4 kHz). I think they should can IBOC for AM once and for all, get rid of NRSC filtering, re-introduce C-QUAM for general use for Stereo and maybe AM would have a fighting chance to survive. Sure, AM will never truly sound like FM. But, it sure can sound a hell of a lot better than it is right now.
 
Peter Q. George (K1XRB) said:
HowardMBurgers said:
So how would that have FMXtra helped AM? It seems to me that if any modulation scheme could use some modernization, it's AM. Or is it that AM needs to just die off with those who grew up listening to it?
Click to expand...

I'll answer that question. AM can do a lot more than it is doing right now. Prior to NRSC filtering (prior to the mid 80's), AM showed a lot of promise with AM Stereo. The AM Stereo radios were beginning show up in the stores and music formats were widely available. The FCC made a BIG blunder by not choosing an AM Stereo standard, and KEEPING a standard (Magnavox) in the first place. By the time the FCC chose the "de facto" standard (C-QUAM), the damage had been done. The NRSC filtering destroyed any possiblity of AM being a high-fidelity medium. Knocking out any audio above 10 kHz and introducing a new "pre-emphasis" curve pretty much did it for AM. The AM radios out there right now are horrible in terms of frequency response and overall quality. And now with IBOC, the average IBOC AM station sounds no better than the best "POTS" line (4 kHz). I think they should can IBOC for AM once and for all, get rid of NRSC filtering, re-introduce C-QUAM for general use for Stereo and maybe AM would have a fighting chance to survive. Sure, AM will never truly sound like FM. But, it sure can sound a hell of a lot better than it is right now.
Click to expand...




Amen!
 
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