I listened to this station on my way to Richmond on Friday evening via my iPhone and then I listened again today (Sunday) on a drive from Alexandria over to Annapolis via an actual HD radio. Overall, it's a nice alternative to BPM on SiriusXM, but the selections are about 6 months behind what BPM is playing. Content wise, and solely by some of the remixes that were in the rotation, I sense that Jon Boesche from WWMX somehow has his hand in this jukebox.
I streamed the station flawlessly all the way south on I-95 on Friday via my iPhone and the ooTunes app over AT&T's 3G network. No one was more shocked than me that it actually never dropped out during the full 100 mile trek. Listening on Sunday via the HD radio, I was moderately impressed with the coverage. In D.C. proper, the coverage never dropped - even in some of the inner city tunnels along I-395. From Alexandria, via the capital beltway (I-495) and route 50 to Annapolis, I only experienced one 5 second drop in the coverage near the route 50 and 450 interchange. Are HD sub-channels still limited to 3% of the ERP of the analogue signal? If my math is correct, that's just 1.5Kw of WPGC's 50Kw analogue. That's not too shabby for 1.5Kw. I'll do some additional driving over the next week or so to the west of the city to see how the coverage holds up in Fairfax and Loudoun counties in Virginia.
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I'm not plowing any new ground with this statement and I'm not complaining about Area 95/5 per se, but the problem with most HD2 and HD3 sub-channels is the lack of truly compelling content. I like dance music and I think the format has enough fans to support an HD2 channel. I also think that it's great that it's at least accessible over the air and via streaming so, in that sense, it's a least moderately interesting to listen to this station. The imaging is tight and sounds well produced (as I would expect from CBS) and they even take a few slaps at WIHT (owned by Clear Channel) with imaging that says "Songs you won't hear on not-so-hot 99.5". Still, the lack of human soul at the helm is very apparent - it's just another jukebox. If the radio conglomerates were serious about making HD radio successful and compelling, they would need to (gasp) *invest in talent to program the sub-channels*. Hell, voice track it with talent from the main station, but include human beings in the content presentation. Otherwise you've just plugged someone's iPod full of dance tracks into the HD2 and called it a day and after the novelty wears off, it begins to wear thin.
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In the end, I'm glad that we've got this station. The over the air HD signal is surprisingly good using a stock Ford radio, although I did hear a lot of compression artifacts in the high frequencies. It sounds a tad "crunchy" on the high end which will probably lead to ear fatigue if I listen for prolonged periods. This might be fixable by tuning the processing or it might simply be a bandwidth issue of the HD radio standard.
