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HD Radio, anyone?

E

edarmsttrong

Will State College get more than one IBOC radio station sometime soon?

I know, it's a small (minded) market, but IBOC is the future of terrestrial broadcasting...like it or not.

I happen to know that certain folks at Keymarket (Forever) will never put an HD radio station on the air, and are hoping it goes away.

Station owners need to get with the times!

Oh that's right...the station owners here are just now figuring out how to put an RBDS subcarrier on the air...wow. When they figure out how to do the RT title and artist display, we'll see the technology in this market progress to circa 1995. It's really not that difficult to do. A static PS station name is just lame.

Maybe they are too cheap, and bought encoders that are not capable of title and artist display. This would NOT suprise me. ::)
 
Wake up and smell the coffee brother. HD and IBOC are both dead in the water. This technology is older than Satelite Man's bread truck.
 
Make fun if you like, but the ol' Marhofer bread truck has been delivering HD signals all around south-central PA for 5+ years. May be I should stop in and see Carol O'Leary and offer my HD expertise. She'd likely throw me out on my Azimuth.
 
I am the NOT so proud owner of an HD radio. I find it to be pretty useless even when I am driving through larger markets. The digital signals are compressed and some of the HD-2/3 channels definitely sound compressed. Reception is not nearly as good as the analog signals; therefore, HD radio gets a lot of complete dropouts.

My primary reason for purchasing an HD radio was to check out some of the side channels that are not streamed online and so that I could have more options for in car listening. Even in some of the larger markets I drive through, HD radio is a big waste. There are a number of HD stations that don't multi-cast and that makes HD pointless. For the stations that do multi-cast, most are automated (some with voice-tracked Clear Channel out of town jocks) with playlists that sound no different than those of their boring analog FM counterparts.

Several years ago, a few stations got creative with their HD2 channels, but now the budgets and staff have dried up. I'm not hearing anything worth investing in an HD radio. Most Clear Channel stations are now broadcasting their pre-packaged 300-600 song formats on the HD2 stations-- Mainstream AC, Country, Mainstream Rock, Classic Rock, etc. You can hear all of those feeds by going to iheartradio.com.

Based on what I've experienced with my HD radio and in the 4 larger markets that I drive through on a regular basis, IBOC is not the future. If I owned a station, I'd not be investing in this technology. Internet radio in the car is the future and I know many people that are streaming internet stations over the iPhone or Blackberry plugged into the car stereo.

Forever is smart not to jump on HD, but they would be smarter to get creative and program some web radio stations (or at least stream the stations that they currently broadcast).
 
c'mon Satelite Man,
Were not you a big proponent of AM stereo? How does that sound in your bread truck. Do you have any David Gates and BR............
 
My HD in the city limits of Chicago is a bust. Far more trouble than benefit, and has ruined MANY choices I once had for listening, due to self-interference, and interference with formerly listenable signals. I see it as a bad cold that we'll get over one day.
 
First, I'd like to say that I am not HD Radio's biggest fan. It's too proprietary. But, radio will be digital and it has to start somewhere.

The broadcast spectrum has become very valuable real estate, and I would think that one day soon, we will see analog radio go away. It happened to TV already, which by the way, had to settle for an inferior system of digital transmission. We can't forget the increased amount of data (think EAS) that can be transmitted via a digital stream. Local station's HD radio streams will probably be the primary means of local EAS information for all mobile devices. Clustered multicast HDs will become utilized by former AMs. CBS is already doing this.

In a pure digital mode, HD radio will have less issues of caused interference, and increased viability. Even if it does sound like crap.

The Feds have shoved this system down our throats, so get used to it. Other countries have approved it's use. Mexico just did yesterday.

Technology will not stand still for them, and they have been slacking off for far too long. So, radio groups should be prepared to bend over to take it hard and deep.

That's all I'm saying...
 
fryman said:
c'mon Satelite Man,
Were not you a big proponent of AM stereo? How does that sound in your bread truck. Do you have any David Gates and BR............
Click to expand...


Actually, AM stereo did not sound that bad...in 1983.

What killed it, was the fact that the FCC tried to let the market place (the NAB) decide what the system would be, and it took too long. With HD Radio, the FCC has already decided on the system.
 
Remember Quadraphonic FM?

That's okay, neither does anyone else. Sounded great, but listeners didn't care.

Eight years into HD radio and 1 million receivers have been sold, representing a whopping 0.3 percent market penetration in the United States. Meaning 99.7 percent of American's can't/won't hear HD radio, no matter how good the programming might be. At that pace, by the year 2025 HD radio still won't be up to 1 percent. Online radio is already at around 15 percent.

Hard to justify spending a few hundred grand to equip a station for HD when the public is staying away in droves.

It does sound great. But so did Quad FM.
 
Let me tell you...when KYW went AM Stereo that teletype SFX was bangin!
 
How apropos - a parallel discussion of proctology and HD Radio.

For my continuing observations on this Junk Engineering conclusively declared irrelevant by the radio industry and the listening public after seven years of relentless hype and lying from its few proponents, visit the HD board on the site.

With all due respect to Ed, if the radio industry were to actually embrace IBOC, they would be committing an act tantamount to jumping out of an 8th-story window much like your namesake did back in the 1950s.

BTW: precisely WHO said "radio must be digital to survive?" When? Why?
 
Savage said:
How apropos - a parallel discussion of proctology and HD Radio.

For my continuing observations on this Junk Engineering conclusively declared irrelevant by the radio industry and the listening public after seven years of relentless hype and lying from its few proponents, visit the HD board on the site.

With all due respect to Ed, if the radio industry were to actually embrace IBOC, they would be committing an act tantamount to jumping out of an 8th-story window much like your namesake did back in the 1950s.

BTW: precisely WHO said "radio must be digital to survive?" When? Why?
Click to expand...
Go gettum, Bob. I'd like to know, too.

From my perspective, computers did not begin to have any usefulness (personally) until they began to develop meaningful analog features.
Radio and Digital are not mutually exclusive technologies, but they ARE at the utmost opposite different ends of
"useful electronic behavior" and while digital can exist nicely in contained media, "ether" has varying amounts of the "stability" needed by digital communications, depending on the wavelength. As radio's ultimate advantage is an already built out distribution system installed by
whatever power you wish to ascribe, ignoring the best features and advantages of the "network" are plain foolish.
As wavelengths get longer, 0 and 1 discrimination AND max possible bitrate gets ever lower, for many reasons.
Radio could be digital, at which point it might as well be a wire, so who cares.

The whole point of radio is wireless and maximum coverage of listners from one transmitter.
That's the efficiency from which radio broadcast success was born.
Have a good time reinventing the wheel, but don't complain to me about how your carbon-fiber wheel bearings keep failing.
 
Quadraphonic stereo?

WYDD did that with some of their late night / weekend programming where they played Jazz music and it never caught on.

The same was true with AM stereo where General Motors and Dodge fought over which type was better and in the end both lost.

My opinion on Digital AM stereo is that it can never happen.

The power consumption for digital radio transmissions to cover the same amount of area would probably increase 10X over the equipment used today... Too many dead zones and too many drop outs.

The best thing to do would be to let the AM die a natural, peaceful death. Give it to the public like the CB radio back in the 70's and let the yokels yak all they want.

As FM is ground into the ground with talk radio, more and more channels are going to disappear and all that will be left is subscription radio such as XM / Sirius.
 
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