HD Radio complaints BMW owners

[TSL2]

Not all BMW owners are happy with HD. A human mind combined with the ability to speak words and invent stories is an interesting thing. But today, with a globe thats connected with bits and bites it's difficult to hide from your history, or what other people REALLY think!

http://www.1addicts.com/forums/showthread.php?t=374926

"I hate being scammed. Sorry if I ranted but this crap makes me angry. And shame on BMW for allowing their electronics infotainment partners to sell them on such a lame idea. Save the money and put an LSD in the E82 as standard equipment - that would make a lot more people happy."


" if you find it going out of sync, you can disable the HD radio and you will be good... Back in December there was a brief time where it was out of sync and the occasional dead air for 5 seconds... I disabled it for a few days, never noticed it again... but in all fairness I seldom listen to the radio."


"this is true... and there is a good reason it's free, it's not that good, especially on a non-nav car.
It may not sound that good because even the upgraded stereo system on my 2010 135i is not that great a system (for the money)!"


"It would be better if the preset would select either one or the other, instead of switching to digital any time the signal is there."

 

[KB1OKL]

Most people here must remember when FM stereo could be turned on and off by the flick of a knob on most home and car receivers. When you were too far away from an FM stereo station say 60+ miles depending on the topography. You just flipped the switched to mono for clear reception, I think there must be some sort of a clause written into these manufacturers contracts that they can't include them or if they do you have to have a degree from MIT to access them. For one thing most people would be shutting off the iBlock in cities say 1 to 2 miles from the broadcast antenna unless their radio could "see" it and probably leave it off for good when they realized that it sounded just as good if not better than HD and came in three times as good, I'm sure ibiquity would think that was very bad advertising to have their junk technology radios all on analog so customer's radios would work.
My Sony tuner would be a great tuner if it wasn't for the undefeatable HD.

 

[Play Freebird]

My Sony tuner would be a great tuner if it wasn't for the undefeatable HD.

This is simply a matter of cutting a trace on the motherboard, probably an easier task than lifting an R-390A

If you don't care to hear digital ever again, just do the neutering operation and don't bother with the switch. See "Forcing Analog Reception" near the bottom of this page on the K6STI website:

http://www.ham-radio.com/k6sti/xdr-f1hd.htm

 

[tomservo]

So what appears to be two actual HD radio complaints mixed in with a bunch of general radio complaints from the Beemer owners?

As for the second one, that appears to be a complaint that should be directed at the radio station, not the radio itself. The technology just can't be put out there and expected to succeed without the radio stations themselves staying on top of the niggling little problems, or investing in the proper equipment to keep those problems from occurring.

 

[Tom Wells]

If an engineer buys a watch that does not keep proper time, he will not be satisfied to add another task to his day with verifying the correct time and resetting it daily. He will, if he likes the watch, have it repaired to run correctly, or put the problem out of his misery by getting a different watch.

No engineer enjoys technology which requires constant fiddling. It is the hallmark of inadequate design.
And if there IS a ready-to-go product which will keep the time synced, management must care enough to buy it.

If the engineer doesn't like the whole ball of wax, he may pretend the add-on box doesn't exist and let management figure out
they need it, and let them care enough to search for it.
Perversely, he may even laugh and enjoy just how far out of time-sync the thing gets.

I can think of one engineer who was told to make the audio on an AM "flat".
Well, he did. It was flat on the audio to the modulator.... Except that >as received<, it was DULL.
He said,"They told me to make it flat, and I did. It's flat."

 

[davideduardo]

Perversely, he may even laugh and enjoy just how far out of time-sync the thing gets.

Fortunately, I don't know or work with any engineers who respond that way.

Station managers are generalists, and while they may have been specialists in sales or programming, few have an engineering background. So it is the responsibility of a station engineer to try to demistify the technical stufff, not to further confuse it.

Making management feel foolish or stupid does not help the station, the rest of the staff or the engineer themself.

Of course, I knew an engineer decades ago who had a totally non-technical manager. When he needed money for a hard to explain project, he simply hauled in a charred final tube he kept under the bench. "Tube blew again. We're on the old spare. Need a new one." "How much?" "$3,500." "Can't you get it rebuilt?" "No, see how charred it is?" "Well, OK, spend it."

 

[KB1OKL]

Of course, I knew an engineer decades ago who had a totally non-technical manager. When he needed money for a hard to explain project, he simply hauled in a charred final tube he kept under the bench. "Tube blew again. We're on the old spare. Need a new one." "How much?" "$3,500." "Can't you get it rebuilt?" "No, see how charred it is?" "Well, OK, spend it."

Haha! Good one. So all the engineers have to do is bring in a charred board and say this darn HD stuff blew up again, time to go back to analog?

 

[tomservo]

No engineer enjoys technology which requires constant fiddling.

That's all engineers do, fiddle. They fiddled around till they got the atom bomb right, they fiddled around till they improved FM stereo and their fiddling around will one day improve HD.

 

[KB1OKL]

No engineer enjoys technology which requires constant fiddling.

That's all engineers do, fiddle. They fiddled around till they got the atom bomb right, they fiddled around till they improved FM stereo and their fiddling around will one day improve HD.

Most people that like to fiddle do it with stuff they enjoy that is able to be improved, HD cannot be improved and most engineers dislike it. The digital information is outside the analog channel not part of it, that is a major design flaw which cannot be changed. HD cannot be improved it can only be maintained and that seems to be difficult judging by the number of HD stations which have problems other than the original design problems which by themselves kept HD from gaining any foothold whatsoever in the marketplace. Anyone that thinks HD is going anywhere but to the nearest landfill is deluding themselves.

 

[Savage]

KB's correct. No amount of "fiddling" is going to make 5 pounds of crap fit in a one-pound bag. See, that's a DOUBLE metaphor for what HD Radio represents.

There isn't enough bandwidth to accomodate the digital and the analog together. The digital interferes with the analog host and adjacent channels. It can't be fixed. The fond hope dating back about ten years to when a few people actually cared, was that one day the analog would be shut off and iBiquity could roll in cash royalties from all-digital. That's not going to happen, so the system is doomed to digital-SCA and NPR's alternate-channel-tech status. And iBiquity geniuses will be looking for new jobs in about 5 years when the company gets sold to COBY or GPX.

Just got a C Crane catalog in the mail. ONE HD product is offered in 50 pages of stuff, and that's Sony's fabled XDR-1HD tuner - Bob Crane touts it for its excellent ANALOG reception qualities while noting how HD causes interference to adjacent channels. (He also remarks on the availability of "alternate channels of varying sound quality" on HD-FM subs. Very guarded language in describing the HD system.)

The emperor is still butt-naked and nobody's even peeking out of curiosity any more.

 

[spunker88]

Most people here must remember when FM stereo could be turned on and off by the flick of a knob on most home and car receivers. When you were too far away from an FM stereo station say 60+ miles depending on the topography. You just flipped the switched to mono for clear reception, I think there must be some sort of a clause written into these manufacturers contracts that they can't include them or if they do you have to have a degree from MIT to access them. For one thing most people would be shutting off the iBlock in cities say 1 to 2 miles from the broadcast antenna unless their radio could "see" it and probably leave it off for good when they realized that it sounded just as good if not better than HD and came in three times as good, I'm sure ibiquity would think that was very bad advertising to have their junk technology radios all on analog so customer's radios would work.
My Sony tuner would be a great tuner if it wasn't for the undefeatable HD.

My tape deck has the FM Stereo/Mono switch. It was basically only useful if you could just barely draw in stereo on a station, or if it kept going in and out of stereo. A weak stereo signal always added static. But on modern units it seems stereo reception can be just as good as mono. Many car stereos will stay in stereo until the signal pretty much vanishes completely.

 

[KB1OKL]

Most people here must remember when FM stereo could be turned on and off by the flick of a knob on most home and car receivers. When you were too far away from an FM stereo station say 60+ miles depending on the topography. You just flipped the switched to mono for clear reception, I think there must be some sort of a clause written into these manufacturers contracts that they can't include them or if they do you have to have a degree from MIT to access them. For one thing most people would be shutting off the iBlock in cities say 1 to 2 miles from the broadcast antenna unless their radio could "see" it and probably leave it off for good when they realized that it sounded just as good if not better than HD and came in three times as good, I'm sure ibiquity would think that was very bad advertising to have their junk technology radios all on analog so customer's radios would work.
My Sony tuner would be a great tuner if it wasn't for the undefeatable HD.

My tape deck has the FM Stereo/Mono switch. It was basically only useful if you could just barely draw in stereo on a station, or if it kept going in and out of stereo. A weak stereo signal always added static. But on modern units it seems stereo reception can be just as good as mono. Many car stereos will stay in stereo until the signal pretty much vanishes completely.

I have one on a late 70's Marantz receiver, it does what it's supposed to.

 

[tomservo]

My tape deck has the FM Stereo/Mono switch. It was basically only useful if you could just barely draw in stereo on a station, or if it kept going in and out of stereo. A weak stereo signal always added static. But on modern units it seems stereo reception can be just as good as mono. Many car stereos will stay in stereo until the signal pretty much vanishes completely.

Many car stereos say they're in stereo when in fact they've long since blended to mono.

Some models are better than others, but my experience in all the modern vehicles I've driven in the last, say, 5 years (and that's only a handful of models, maybe 10 at most) don't even put through good stereo sound while in strong signal areas. They are all partially or totally blended to mono.

If stereo is so dang good, why do almost all modern car radios blend so quickly to mono? Hint: It doesn't work (in the same way HD doesn't work, the technology is not perfect.) Sure some people in isolated situations can get fairly quiet stereo decoding with a rooftop antenna for stations from 150 miles out, but those are not normal listeners, and certainly not the norm for radios in general.

But because stereo has been an accepted standard for 40+ years everyone is used to it, and expects it to fail under certain circumstances. I can't help but think if this board were around in the early 70's, there'd be an entire board dedicated to stopping stereo sound at all costs, because it alters the sound quality and reception so much!

 

[KB1OKL]

My tape deck has the FM Stereo/Mono switch. It was basically only useful if you could just barely draw in stereo on a station, or if it kept going in and out of stereo. A weak stereo signal always added static. But on modern units it seems stereo reception can be just as good as mono. Many car stereos will stay in stereo until the signal pretty much vanishes completely.

Many car stereos say they're in stereo when in fact they've long since blended to mono.

Some models are better than others, but my experience in all the modern vehicles I've driven in the last, say, 5 years (and that's only a handful of models, maybe 10 at most) don't even put through good stereo sound while in strong signal areas. They are all partially or totally blended to mono.

If stereo is so dang good, why do almost all modern car radios blend so quickly to mono? Hint: It doesn't work (in the same way HD doesn't work, the technology is not perfect.) Sure some people in isolated situations can get fairly quiet stereo decoding with a rooftop antenna for stations from 150 miles out, but those are not normal listeners, and certainly not the norm for radios in general.

But because stereo has been an accepted standard for 40+ years everyone is used to it, and expects it to fail under certain circumstances. I can't help but think if this board were around in the early 70's, there'd be an entire board dedicated to stopping stereo sound at all costs, because it alters the sound quality and reception so much!

Some of the comparisons I see on this board are ludicrous.

 

[radioskeptic]

In Reply # 2 (back on page 1 of this thread), Play Freebird said:

Quote from: KB1OKL on September 11, 2010, 09:59:35 AM

My Sony tuner would be a great tuner if it wasn’t for the undefeatable HD.

This is simply a matter of cutting a trace on the motherboard, probably an easier task than lifting an R-390A

If you don’t care to hear digital ever again, just do the neutering operation and don't bother with the switch. See “Forcing Analog Reception” near the bottom of this page on the K6STI website:

http://www.ham-radio.com/k6sti/xdr-f1hd.htm

Did you read the section under the heading “Temperature,” Freebird?

With a thermistor attached to C908 on the power board and the top cover in place, I measured 63° C (145° F) after one hour at 25° C ambient. I converted the 10.5-V supply from half- to full-wave rectification, intending to reduce transformer losses and lower the RMS ripple current in C908. After conversion the temperature rose more slowly, but it was only 1° F cooler after an hour.

Ken Wetzel added extra feet to enlarge the space under his tuner and improve air flow. This has only a minor effect on internal temperature, but it's easy to do.

A tiny fan mounted inside the tuner should greatly lower its temperature. Some 12-V fans become inaudible when operated at a lower voltage. Try the unregulated 5.2 V, switching the fan and a back-biased diode with a transistor turned on by the 8.5 V.

Reducing temperature will prolong electrolytic capacitor life. The expected lifetime doubles for each drop of 10° C. A fan might well lower the temperature 20° C, quadrupling capacitor life. Both the tuner module and HD Radio module contain surface-mount electrolytics that would be difficult to replace.

So if you really don’t care to hear digital ever again, why not just remove the remove the HD module? That would do more to reduce the internal temperature than converting to a full-wave power supply, installing a fan and putting larger feet under the case combined. And it would also greatly enhance the value of the tuner, since you’d never again have to worry about “[IBOC] coding artifacts, the tuner [switching] back and forth between analog and digital on a marginal signal, or a distant co-channel HD Radio signal [co-opting] the analog signal you're trying to receive.”

 

[radioskeptic]

One quick afterthought:

I wouldn’t buy the Sony, no matter how good its analog performance, even if I were able to get it at half-off and the dealer was willing to make that modification (removing the IBOC circuitry) for me.

Why not? Because I can’t stand the idea of even 1/10th of one cent of my money finding its way into Iniquity’s coffers!

 

[KB1OKL]

Yeah it was a soul searching experience buying the HD tuner but I wanted first hand to see how good or how bad IBOC was and it certainly didn't disappoint at least as far as how bad it is.
I have thought of disabling the Sony's IBOC (I've seen that article before) but I'm not an FM DXer and the content doesn't really bowl me over either so maybe I'll do it someday, the heat problem deterred me also. For FM in my bedroom I use my Bose wave, it's not real sensitive but it does the job. The Bose is on top of an R390-A which is on top of an SP-600, very stressed table.

 

[Play Freebird]

A recommendation: One of my favorite portable receivers on the market today is the Sangean PR-D5. It's HD-free, has very good AM sensitivity with a nice balance between selectivity and frequency response, and displays FM RDS data (PS, RT, and can set the internal clock to CT on demand). The FM section is also quite hot and stereo reception can be defeated. To anyone considering a Bose Wave or Boston Acoustics clock radio, save your money and listen to the Sangean instead.