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Can HD radio help me pick up chicks?

N

nd2023

Banned
According to an HD radio commercial, it should
Here's the audio of the commercial
---------------------------------
Hey how was your date with Melissa?

So, she gets in the car and says normally I drive but I see you have an HD Radio Receiver.

He he, sweet.

Yeah the whole time we're diggin' all the new HD2 HD3 digital channels.

Glad I have an HD Radio Receiver in MY ride! Now all I need is Melissa's number.

Ha! No chance! We used the itunes tagging feature, and now we have a bunch of new songs for our next date.

Check out all the new HD Radio car stereos from Alpine, JVC, Kenwood, Pioneer and Sony, now at Best Buy.
More Stations, no monthly fee. HD Radio, a good deal more

------------------------------------------------------

So should I put an HD radio in my car and use it as a chick magnet? Yeah right.

Last summer I was on a date with a girl who had an HD radio in her car. Of course I noticed it since that was the first time I saw an HD radio in anyone's car (I have ridden in the car of a chief engineer of a major market cluster, and even he did not have an HD radio in his car even though his stations transmitted in HD). She didn't like her HD radio and she had to pay to get the HD reception disabled because it was annoying that it kept cutting in and out of HD, and some stations didn't have their analog and HD1 synced. I tried to convince her to at least re-enable her HD radio and talked for a while about it, she didn't seem interested. I didn't get a second date, and I think HD radio was a buzzkill. She probably wished I would go away like I wish IBUZ would go away when I'm DXing.

Flash forward a few months. I gave my ex-girlfriend a portable HD radio for Christmas (I gave her other stuff too, so don't judge me lol). I noticed that she didn't touch her HD radio because it was collecting dust. In January I went to her hometown in Minnesota and I became...obsessed with KDWB-HD2, which had such a wide variety of dance music, songs I hadn't heard in years and older songs I didn't hear at all till now. It doesn't stream online so I was trying to listen to that station as much as I could while I was there. She didn't seem to completely understand why I was obsessed with that station, so much that I noted down a list of over 50 songs I liked (since the Insignia doesn't have iTunes tagging). We broke up later for other reasons and I don't think HD radio was the cause of that, but HD radio certainly didn't put a "buzz" in our relationship.

Now that I'm single again, I'm not going to make the mistake of trying to insert HD radio in my future relationships. It hasn't really helped me like it helped the guy in the commercial score "Melissa". I'm not going to put an HD radio in my car and trying to see for myself if "Melissa" is out there, waiting for me to sweep her off her feet with my HD radio. If anything, I have a love-hate relationship with HD radio. I love some HD2 stations and my Sony XDRF1HD and Insignia portable, which wouldn't exist without HD radio. But I hate the IBUZ and bad HD reception (both of which are mutually exclusive, better HD reception = more IBUZ).

Those HD radio commercials want us to believe that HD radio is the best thing since sliced bread. We would spend $99 on a boombox sold to us by Best Buy employees eager to sell it to us. And now, it's a way for guys to impress the ladies. I wish it were that easy to turn on a lady by letting her play with my HD radio. Wonder how the HD radio marketing team sold that flawed technology to broadcasters if its commercials are so delusional.
 
Nick said:
According to an HD radio commercial, it should
Here's the audio of the commercial
---------------------------------
Hey how was your date with Melissa?

So, she gets in the car and says normally I drive but I see you have an HD Radio Receiver.

He he, sweet.

Yeah the whole time we're diggin' all the new HD2 HD3 digital channels.

Glad I have an HD Radio Receiver in MY ride! Now all I need is Melissa's number.

Ha! No chance! We used the itunes tagging feature, and now we have a bunch of new songs for our next date.

Check out all the new HD Radio car stereos from Alpine, JVC, Kenwood, Pioneer and Sony, now at Best Buy.
More Stations, no monthly fee. HD Radio, a good deal more
Click to expand...

At first I thought you had to be kidding! I guess if T-Mobile is trying to sell service with commercials featuring Carly Foulkes, the HD folks can try using the girl angle to sell HD radio. It won't matter. People aren't switching to T-Mobile because of Carly, T-Mobile doesn't have the iPhone. And people won't buy HD radio if they use girls to advertise, because it doesn't work.
 
Wow! Here I am thinking that my best chance with the ladies is: Talk, listen, understand and behave like a gentleman at all times for them. I thought that a gift like jewelry or maybe a Feeldoe could brighten her eyes. DUH! Only to find that an HD radio was the secret key to her heart! How could I have been so dumb? Live and learn, I guess!
 
Back in 1989, I had an Alpine Head Unit (Alpine Cassette Receiver) in my Honda CRX. That Alpine deck was cool because it had some auto rewind feature where you could set a button and the cassette would rewind after the song played - cueing up and repeating the same song over and over.

I was on a date, had enabled the auto rewind feature, and then to impress the girl, told the Alpine to rewind by speaking aloud the word "rewind" at the end of the song.... and the deck started to rewind. LOOK, NO HANDS! She thought it was the coolest thing ever - a voice commanded cassette receiver....rewind on voice command!

So I guess it's all in how you play out the HD scenario.

And to think that today, cars do accept voice commands.

And I married that girl!

Thanks, Alpine!
 
JRZFM100 said:
Back in 1989, I had an Alpine Head Unit (Alpine Cassette Receiver) in my Honda CRX. That Alpine deck was cool because it had some auto rewind feature where you could set a button and the cassette would rewind after the song played - cueing up and repeating the same song over and over.

I was on a date, had enabled the auto rewind feature, and then to impress the girl, told the Alpine to rewind by speaking aloud the word "rewind" at the end of the song.... and the deck started to rewind. LOOK, NO HANDS! She thought it was the coolest thing ever - a voice commanded cassette receiver....rewind on voice command!

So I guess it's all in how you play out the HD scenario.

And to think that today, cars do accept voice commands.

And I married that girl!

Thanks, Alpine!
Click to expand...

I don't think it would impress a girl to tune to an HD2 station that is cutting in and out. "Hey, let's listen to half a song".
 
Here in Dallas, we have a station where the HD-2 audio sounds markedly better than the HD-1. (and, the analog sounds better than the HD-1 as well)

It's CBS O/O KLUV. This topic has received limited attention (very little) discussion on the Dallas-Fort Worth Board... no one is that interested, because, seemingly no one is listening in HD.

Today I have a Kenwood HD head unit with a DEFEATABLE HD section (thank God)- so you can force the radio into analog only mode.

I solved the problem of the digital artifacts on KLUV HD-1 (and all my HD problems) by forcing the receiver into analog only. Bye Bye HD-1 digital artifacts on KLUV!

So in the case of KLUV, HD-2 sounding better than HD-1, that might well impress the girl.

I've heard this is a common story. It's been said that many markets have stations where the analog sounds better than HD-1 due to the absence of digital artifacts. I've been told that even Lite FM NYC has this problem.

The promise of HD Radio reminds me of this promotional article from Orban circa 1985, written by Robert Deltoni I think. The paper was entitled " AM CAN SOUND ALMOST AS GOOD AS FM "

HD can sound almost as good as FM!
 
The only way I think HD really sounds better than the analog FM is when there's no subchannels and the audio is encoded in a high enough bitrate that cascading codec issues are negated. None of my local Clear Channels sound good in analog OR digital because the music is so, er, swishy. Plus, they run subchannels on most of their stations. Cumulus, on the other hand, runs no subchannels and has super clean audio so their HDs sound really, really good. Better than anything I've streamed over 3G and years better than satellite radio.

Too bad the tropo last night was so bad I couldn't decode anything even looking directly at the towers. ::)
 
"Hey babe, wanna go to my car and play with my HD Radio Receiver? You'll love the HD2 HD3 channels and iTunes tagging."
This should be the best pickup line ever according to the HD radio marketing department.
 
It is pretty obvious that not a lot of money has been spent on IBOC advertising since it's inception. To be fair though I wouldn't want the job of trying to make a sows ear appear to be a silk purse.
 
Nick, Nick, Nick. We need to have a LONG chat, my friend. ;)

But just to tide you over, a tip: on a first date, instead of talking about receivers, radio formats and transmission modes....your humble correspondent recommends you focus on the subject every woman wants you to pursue. Talk to her about HER.
 
Savage said:
Nick, Nick, Nick. We need to have a LONG chat, my friend. ;)

But just to tide you over, a tip: on a first date, instead of talking about receivers, radio formats and transmission modes....your humble correspondent recommends you focus on the subject every woman wants you to pursue. Talk to her about HER.
Click to expand...

But...that's not what the HD radio commercial was about.

I do admit I made a mistake, but I just couldn't help to notice the HD radio in her car. I hoped that she was a radio geek just like me because I saw she had that HD radio. I thought she was one of the few that cared enough about radio to get an HD radio. But alas, it was an (unwanted) gift and she hated the HD "feature" so much that she paid to disable the HD reception.
 
I heard a really strange HD ad last night, they kept repeating the term "HD radio" over and over, it was annoyingly repetitive. I kind of laughed when they talked about "learn what everybody is talking about" - meaning HD radio. Yeah - in what parallel universe? My daughter was in the car and had never heard of HD radio. She thought the commercial was stupid and doesn't want to take out the factory installed Bose audio system in her car just to get the $100 HD radio they advertised at Walmart.

They also talked about "dozens" of HD-2 and HD-3 stations. Maybe one dozen in a major city like Houston, not dozens. I don't count the stupid re-broadcasts of AM, low bandwidth talk, and other HD-3's that probably don't have much reason for existence.
 
Yeah: the uber-hyped "stations between the stations" (a positioner the Alliance finally dumped after it was repeatedly pointed out that the few persons responding were turning into DXers, thinking an out-of-market signal on 95.7 was one of the stations-between locals on 94.9 and 96.5).... :D

Putting the subchannels into perspective: typical offerings in most markets are low-bitrate oldies or derivative formats, low-fi voice or ethnic brokered programs, AM news-talk simulcasts and...tympani roll please...that most "uqibuitous" of HD-2 and HD-3 formats, all-dead-air, all the time.

But even if THREE subs actually worked well and had moderately interesting programming - THIS is what we in the radio industry have to counter hundreds of choices on satellite and thousands on the web? Give me a large economy-sized break, already.... ::)
 
I don't know about a break, but launching that "sidebands over your adjacents" to the wrong chick could produce a bust. The chauffeured - back seat ride - downtown in a Crown Victoria kind...
 
We had to trade my daughter's car last night for something new. I had explained HD radio to her, and demonstrated the formats available in Houston. When I asked if she wanted HD radio in her car, she laughed at me and said she wanted satellite - many more stations she likes. Why was I not surprised she opted for satellite over HD radio?
 
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