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Does HD Radio improve the quality and clarity of speech stations like NPR or Sports?
- Thread starter Wolfie770
- Start date
I'm not sure what you're asking about AM or FM. HD on FM does the same thing for speech content as it does for music - it reduces the noise floor and eliminates multipath interference that can affect analog FM. The handful of stations that run HD on AM also have lower noise floors and you don't get the interference you get on analog AM.
Both, just "HD Radio" on Both Bands - I lack experience with the AM version, but KNOW (and KSJN and KCMP on the same network, but with music) all sound vastly better on HD than on their Analog signals. Some stations have almost no difference, some, it's very great. That's what I don't understand. KFXN is KFXN no matter the signal, KNOW HD is another world compared to KNOW FM.
It largely depends on the station's processing (on both the analog and digital sides) and the receiver you're using.
When 1010 WINS was transmitting an HD signal (before they got an FM simulcast) I found that their analog AM audio actually had better clarity than the digital HD audio, because it had more aggressive processing and greater midrange boost to compensate for narrowband receivers.
Plus, my VW's radio is programmed to gradually open up the treble when switching from analog AM to HD, to make the large difference in audio bandwidth less jarring. So this momentarily makes the HD audio sound dull until it opens up to full bandwidth. And when it runs low on the digital buffer, it starts rolling off the treble to prepare for falling back to analog, so this unintentionally serves as an audible signal strength indicator for the digital HD audio on AM: you can hear the treble response rise and fall according to how clean of a digital decode it's getting. (But not on pure-digital AM HD signals -- in that case, the audio bandwidth stays constant.)
When 1010 WINS was transmitting an HD signal (before they got an FM simulcast) I found that their analog AM audio actually had better clarity than the digital HD audio, because it had more aggressive processing and greater midrange boost to compensate for narrowband receivers.
Plus, my VW's radio is programmed to gradually open up the treble when switching from analog AM to HD, to make the large difference in audio bandwidth less jarring. So this momentarily makes the HD audio sound dull until it opens up to full bandwidth. And when it runs low on the digital buffer, it starts rolling off the treble to prepare for falling back to analog, so this unintentionally serves as an audible signal strength indicator for the digital HD audio on AM: you can hear the treble response rise and fall according to how clean of a digital decode it's getting. (But not on pure-digital AM HD signals -- in that case, the audio bandwidth stays constant.)
I am also in the Minneapolis-St. Paul DMA. In fact, I just bought a Sangean HDR-18 a few days ago. I will have to see what differences I notice in the various analog FM vs HD FM station in the Twin Cities.
I also bought a C. Crane CC WiFi 3 Internet Radio some time back. I ran an audio patch cable from the Line Out of the wifi radio to the Auxiliary In on the Sangean HDR-18. To my ears, the audio from both of those speakers is much better than just the wifi radio internal speaker.
When I worked in telecom managing teams developing mobile phone infrastructure hardware and software, we actually had a HD voice feature about 10-15 years ago for providers to license to offer better audio sound on phone calls. In that industry, studies and tests showed people talked longer when both parties had HD voice versus traditional cell phone audio quality.
Of course, cell phone usage was fast approaching the tipping point of being more data devices than mobile telephones….and companies got away from charging for minutes, so keeping customers talking longer no longer brought in more revenue.
I have no idea if anyone has done a study on the same for spoken word audio on radio, but there would seem like there would be similar findings perhaps.
Of course, cell phone usage was fast approaching the tipping point of being more data devices than mobile telephones….and companies got away from charging for minutes, so keeping customers talking longer no longer brought in more revenue.
I have no idea if anyone has done a study on the same for spoken word audio on radio, but there would seem like there would be similar findings perhaps.
They might be more focused on increasing audio quality for streaming nowadays for talk as well as music formats.
HD is a trade-off. On the one hand, there's much less hiss and other noise, and multipath is not a problem. It also solves the curse of the 75µsec pre-emphasis curve. On the other hand, it's prone to drop-outs, since either you have enough signal to decode or you don't, and there are digital artifacts that some people can ignore but that other people are very sensitive to. I fall somewhere in-between: I can tolerate the artifacts if only HD-1 and sometimes HD-2 are used, but when you get into having three or four digital channels on the same signal, that metallic toilet swirl audio effect ruins the listening experience for me. In short, I can sometimes deal with it, particularly if an HD-2 channel has programming that I find of interest, but I am not unreservedly enthusiastic about it.
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