===>> First, there is no HD Radio "industry." There is the radio industry, which is using HD like it used FM stereo... it is a tool. There is no separate industry.
Seems to me like soem folks at Ibiquity would disagree. They are making a tidy profit off of royalties each year from every station. It is a little niche industry, but a separate entity nevertheless.
***** One compa ny is not an industry. This is just a technology supplier to radio, but if you want to call it an industry, fine.
First off - I was talking about AM, not FM. AM will never fly because it can't work at night without jamming the entire band. Lets be honest - there are problems. Horror stories about Receptor radios having to have dipole antennas, even in strong reception areas. Most consumers throw the dipole away on existing stereos, or at best leave it crumpled up behind the entertainment center. Are they suddenly going to become more technical and use the dipole properly? I think not. Their radios and stereos will default back to analog mode on FM as a result, and they will never see any benefit from IBOC.
****** So little listening takes place at night, and so much less to AM, that even if night HD is not approved, the main benefit is daytime.
****** A defective receiver does not make the HD technolgoy bad. It just means the receiver is bad, And some testing has discoverd that the culprit may not be the antennas, but readiation from the display on the receiver. Bad design.
Gee- your bias against the Western 2/3 of the country is definitely showing.
***** of our 72 stations, all but 12 are in the Southwest: Nevada, Texas, NM, AZ, CA. We have a fine regard for the area.
And I freely admit I couldn't care less about the central part of NY. So why don't you folks use IBOC there and just leave the rest of the country out of it? 300 mile range on AM, and 150 mile range on FM is about a necessity in some areas. And before you disrespect rural people again, why don't you try living in a small town in West Texas 100 miles from a metro area - do business with people there, have friends there - and then tell me that these folks are second class citizens that don't deserve reliable radio service, and are underprivileged because they aren't living in New York City. The rights of the minority should NEVER be trampled for a majority - is that really what you are advocating and believe?
***** The issue at first was inability to hear in one market adjacents from another market. In rural locations, there is no reson to believe that there will be significant interference by the HD sidebands, since ALL stations will be distant and weaker.
I know you have ties in Los Angeles. I was just out there. There are enough problems with reception right now going from the basin to the San Fernando Valley and then over another mountain range to Santa Clarita - same sort of thing South and West. You think an HD transmitter anywhere in that region is going to cover more than a fraction of the area with reliable HD service? IF SO - I'd sure like to know the location, height of the tower, and ERP!
******We have 2 Mt Wilson signals, KLVE and KSCA that are HD. We have one AM, 50 kw KTNQ. And two A's, on the basin floor, KRCD and KRCV. All have HD signals that are usable as far as the analog signals are... in LA, as in all our other markets, 95% of FM listening is in the 64 dbu, and on AM, in LA, it is in the 15 mv/m. HD is often a better alternative on AM, due to noise.
It seems to me that analog FM isn't even able to do from halfway to San Diego in the South to Riverside in the East to Santa Clarita in the North. The area is a nightmare for coverage!!! Adding HD to the mix is utter madness or utter futility!
***** The analog signals were assigned long ago. FCC, trying to make radio local, put very low power limits for AM and FM in the US: HD gets the same usable ocverage as the analog in most cases.
===>> Car radios found in Houston at $159. Price point by Q4 at around $100. My first CD player was $1,400 but they came down, didn't they? Same with Plasma TVs, etc., etc.
Write me when there is a head unit available that I can feed into an FM modulator - one in the $50 range. I paid $50 for my SRF-A1 and it put decent AM stereo into my car radio for years. Until the brain dead management at Radio Disney decided their target audience would buy $300 Receptor radios. I paid $50 for my TM-152 at home. It still sounds GREAT - on NON IBOC stations.
***** Like CD players, DVD players, VHS players and such, the price will come down as more receivers hit the market.
===>> I don't have to listen to samples. We have about 25 of these suckers on the air, and 5 of them right here in LA. They sound nothing like what you say, neither AM nor FM. The AM is extremely clean, as long as stations do not do cascading codecs ahead of the HD encoder.
If so, then Ibiquity would be well advised to put a better sample on their own web site!!! Or maybe I am especially annoyed by phase shifts - they sound like low level grinding on my nerves. C-Quam still sounds GREAT on my TM-152. All that was needed was for the FCC to mandate AM stereo on all radios over a certain price, they way they forced the issue on text for the deaf on TVs - and we would not be having the IBOC debate. All AMs would be in broadband stereo, no nighttime restrictions right now! Plenty of music formats on AM.
****** C Quam was dead on release. Too late for AMs to compete with FM in analog stereo. An analog system that is not on the same chip with the same system as FM will die, as no manufacturer will include it as AM is perceived as being dead.... and it is below age 45.
===>> AM is totally uninteresting and appealing for people under 45, who do not listen in droves: the AM share of listening in 12-44 is 10%. Some individual FM staitons do better than that! Analog AM audio will never bring younger demos, and the band is ageing 1 year every 18 months (averagelistener age) and will soon have no advertiser appeal at all.
Radio Disney - appeals to people over 45? And since when does a talk format that is probably #1 or #2 in ratings in their city ever want to consider going back to a music format? I say it again - IBOC is WASTED on most of the stations that have converted, because they are talk or sports - and will never consider music because they are enormously successful with their present talk format. All they want is stereo musical beds and stereo commercials - at the cost of jamming their spectral neighbors. That is not sufficient reason to justify jamming.
***** Radio Disney is a marketing brand extension, not a radio operation. It has nearly no audience, and exists only because it is cheap for what it achieves. AMs are talk right now because that is all they can do. And the age of AM listeners is almost all over 55 now, and that demo is unsalable. KGO in SF is down in billing by 30% in the last 6 years as its demos age and it is no longer of appeal to advertisers. HD can improve AMs ability to reach under 45 listeners, who have no interest in AM now.
===>> HD FM sounds considerabley better, since, to start with, it has no preemphasis. Add the fact that we are all using much less processing as it is a digital signal, and you have nice sound. Then you have HD 2 channels, adding diversity to the market. With our Tejano HD 2 in Houston, we sold out every HD radio in the market in a few days, and have generate many orders to places like J&R and Crutchfield.
Recent articles about HD radio in Radio World disagree with you. The HD2 channels on most stations are just as heavily processed as the main channel. And you cannot underprocess the main channel, because fringe listeners would hear the difference as the digital signal is lost and acquired.
****** A couple of disgruntled Leonard Kahn fa ns does not make a movement or does not create truth. We are enormously happy with it
I am glad your Tejano format is successful - but remember that to the English speaking world, any Spanish language format is irrelevant. Not that I have anything against Spanish language stations - there is one on 106.5 that has tolerable, and pleasant Spanish Christian music. But the fact it is a foreign language makes my listening times short.
********* Well, Hispanics are 14% of the US now, so they have an right to good radio service, too. My point is that given new free formats, people will buy radios.
The benefits to radio from a good digital system could be enormous. Ibiquity is not it. It seems to solve problems for some stations in densely packed, geographically small metro areas. IF there are no first adjacents on FM or AM, coverage outside the metro area is possible - provided good DX'ing techniques are applied by the listener. But DX'ers are definitely not being respected by IBOC advocates, and when the entire band is blanketed by the equivalent of legal jamming - those techniques that are ridiculed now - but necessary to even receive the HD signal - will then be impossible.
*********** HD is the standard, with 2000 stations signed or on the air.
One of the principles of American justice has always been that your freedom ends where your neighbor's nose begins. In other words - keep your sidebands OFF OF adjacent frequencies and NOBODY will complain. So a digital system is needed that operates within that constraint. No in band ON channel, which is a clever deception actually describing in band ADJACENT channel - in band IN channel should be the requirement and acronym: IBIC.
****** SInce there is no evidence of listening to the adjacent channels of near locals, there is no real case to be made here. WHo in Dallas listens to something on 810 or 830? And if you get away from Dallas, the sidebands of 820 will be reduced, and not interfere with anything listenable.
