> Hmmm, you must not have listened to HD recently. Everybody
> that I've given a demo to certainly can tell the difference.
> As many of the engineering folk that I talk to like to say,
> it's all about the lack of pre-emphasis.
>
> HD sounds better than analog pretty much across the board.
Only if: 1.) you are oblivious to digital codec artifacts, and 2.) the station is processing its analog and digital audio independently, which many are not.
Besides, it's easy to get "High Definition" audio from an analog FM station: just back off on the clipping by a few dB's. Aside from the Classical and NPR-type stations which naturally have lightly-processed audio, there are a handful of FM music stations in my area which dare to be about 3 dB "quieter" than the "loudest" stations on the dial. (That's just one single click of my car radio's volume control.) In exchange for this, these stations sound absolutely phenomenal, compared to all the smashed-and-trashed audio that plagues the dial, especially from CHR and Urban stations (where all the music they're playing is already heavily clipped to begin with).
<P ID="signature">______________
"This is the New York Emergency Broadcast System satellite channel. They took the crosstown bus."</P>