If you run Voltair at around 4-7 they're not objectionable to most people. Crank it up higher and YOU WILL hear it. Doesn't matter, Nielsen now supplies encoding software that goes directly into your AM or FM audio processor (if you have one of the latest ones). No reason to keep a Voltair in there then.
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How many AM stations still actively use HD Radio (AM-HD)? Are there any in your area?
- Thread starter Wolfie770
- Start date
The analog signal in Yonkers used to be subject to power line noise - again this was 1990s when the station was relevant to Westchester County.
Now, you can blast 50 kilowatts of digital on 1230, but if nobody's going to listen, what's the point? Why would I make efforts to listen to Digital 1230 when I can get similar shows on 710 and 770 with NO effort?
The digital being more tolerant is irrelevant when there are few-to-no receivers or people willing to MAKE THE EFFORT.
The whole idea these days is that there really isn't any effort needed.
It's not "little to no receivers," after all. It's at least one in every three cars on the road and growing.
I don't have to think at all about listening to HD - I get in my car and turn on any of the dozen FM stations in the market that run HD and there it is.
When I was down in DC a couple of weeks ago, same thing with 820 - I tuned to AM 820 like I would do in any car, and up it came in full digital sound, with title and artist and all that good stuff.
The bigger challenge, of course, is giving people something they want to listen to and promoting it to them to break through the noise of a million other infinite dial choices. But that's a programming and promotion challenge, not a technical one.
It's not "little to no receivers," after all. It's at least one in every three cars on the road and growing.
I don't have to think at all about listening to HD - I get in my car and turn on any of the dozen FM stations in the market that run HD and there it is.
When I was down in DC a couple of weeks ago, same thing with 820 - I tuned to AM 820 like I would do in any car, and up it came in full digital sound, with title and artist and all that good stuff.
The bigger challenge, of course, is giving people something they want to listen to and promoting it to them to break through the noise of a million other infinite dial choices. But that's a programming and promotion challenge, not a technical one.
Accuracy.
Voltair does not encode. It simply enhances the masking frequencies so that encoding happens more often. Even if you use Nielsen's PPM encoding app in a software driven processor, many/most will want to further enhance the audio to make the encoder activate more times a minute.
Trying to achieve "accuracy" in a user-modifiable system like Wikipedia is just not an achievable quality.
But...
In my last two new cars (last year and 2016) the dealer delivered each with the HD deactivated. Two different manufacturers. The reasoning was the same: "we get a lot of complaints about how it makes it harder to find the station(s) I like" so, unless requested, they left HD turned off.
Here we are assuming that the listener even has any interest in going to AM. In the DC market, what station is a major attraction to listeners... enough to make them go through the several steps need to find a particular AM?
My concern, and why I would neither work for nor buy an AM stations, is that there are so many choices in other "channels" and so few on AM that it is just "too much work" or "just a bother" to try to get an AM station today.
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In Highschool I asked my French teacher once (she was a CBS FM listener) if I were to put s station like that on AM would she listen? She said no She was also a button pusher and said pushing the tuning knob in for AM (Delco Chevrolet radio) was one movement too much.
It apparently disrupted her "pattern" (CBS FM, NEW FM, K-Rock, Lite FM) She was NOT a radio geek. The only AM she had programmed was WFAN 660, WCBS 880 and WINS aM), the latter two just for traffic 660 was for the Mets games, nothing else. She was a child of the 1960s.
This was 1990. Imagine now!!!!
I always assumed that it was protect 690. Either way I'm glad they can't! One of the few stations that's in perfect sync for listening to play by play at the ballgame.
There is nothing nuanced or horse sh*tty about it. The negative effects on listening enjoyment of low bitrate lossy audio codecs are widely known and you can find documentation of them absolutely everywhere audio is discussed in any serious manner online. That includes years of group listening tests and auditions done at popular forums like hydrogenaudio where the findings made have contributed to the creation and fine-tuning of encoders, like LAME, specially designed to produce maximally inaudible artifacting over even "professional" MP3 encoders released by the likes of Fraunhofer. The fact that there also continues to be ongoing R&D in the field that's given us successive generations of this technology, always with the goal of further reducing audible artifacting at any given bitrate (MP3 > AAC > Opus > MQA) -- to say nothing of the many attempts at creating bandwidth-lean lossless formats so people can just avoid lossy crap in the first place (FLAC, ALAC, APE, et al.) -- only further vindicates that lossy audio is highly dissatisfying to many people.
If the radio industry hasn't seen the same level of research done on how low bitrate lossy audio affects TSL as it used to see on how badly heavy dynamics processing affected it, that's most likely because most of the old research done on TSL-killing processing came from people with the financial incentive to publish it -- from the people selling stations the newer generations of cleaner processors to replace their older generation, TSL-killing boxes and homebrew black art stuff that everyone had resorted to turning up to 11. By comparison, the people selling lossy codec technology to radio stations in the modern era (iBiquity/DTS/Xperi + streaming codec vendors) would have the opposite of any incentive to show those stations the existing research on lossy audio's negative effects on listening enjoyment, because then they'd be throwing wrenches right into most of their sales efforts.
The radio industry also has the current luxury of most listening still being to their analog signals, unlike long ago with processing where everybody was exposed to it and bad processing would therefore take a significantly larger toll on their TSLs.
If this were caused by advanced age or hearing loss or tinnitus, I would be hearing it everywhere -- on CDs, old vinyl records, old cassettes, DVD/BluRay audio, and so on, not just on FM and AM, and not just on exactly and only the stations where I can then go and coincidentally see it on spectral graphs of their audio. Other than 19 kHz pilot tones now being inaudible to me, my hearing is quite fine, tinnitus-free, and at least as lossy codecs go, I've been keenly aware of and able to discern the sound of the damage they do to audio since first experimenting with l3enc and mp3enc in the mid-late 1990s, in my teens. There is nothing illusory about this stuff. Some people can't hear it at all, others can hear it only at low bitrates, and still others can hear it at all but the highest ones -- and that's regardless of age. It's the nature of psychoacoustic modeling. It tries to hide itself, and it succeeds with most people but fails with the rest. If you're one of the people it succeeds against, be thankful you can't hear it rather than implying that those who can just have faulty ears. Because for those who can hear it, many sources of digital audio now suck, and the last thing we need is more grief. With lossless fallbacks like CDs fading away, it's not an enjoyable time to be a music lover for us.
I have no idea what the stations I sampled in L.A. are running theirs at, but it sounds shotgun-to-the-eardrum excessive to me. You really don't hear it in the demos I posted? Not even in the KYLA clip? Because if not, all I can say is, consider yourself beyond blessed, as its psychoacoustical nature is protecting your ears from its presence as successfully as IBOC's HDC is keeping you from hearing its own presence.
No, based upon many someones who know they hear something and can then verify it with their own eyes on spectralgraphs. You're right, though: I was pipedreaming by thinking the FCC would regulate against this stuff when it won't regulate against quality issues in any other sense. I guess I fell into some wishful thinking that since they at least regulate against dead air, they might regulate against this, which renders the stations using it -- at least at Los Angeles levels -- as good as dead air to all the people who're able to hear it.
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I don't know enough about the characteristics of a Franklin to understand how that might affect bandwidth. I always thought, in perhaps oversimplification, that a Franklin was simply a vertical ground system (or "counterpoise") with the radiator stacked on top of it. That would seem to be good for bandwidth, as the elements are supposed to be half-wave each.
i wonder if that, combined with the egregious use of Voltair is what makes KFBK sound so metallic.
I can kinda understand why would commercial stations crank up the Voltair, but why does EMF do it? As a non-commercial operator relying on listener donations, they don't need to care that much about their ratings.
For one thing, you would need to be in a PPM market. If you're not a Nielsen subscriber running on straight donations, why bother encoding?
KFBK does sound terrible, but I've always thought that KNBR sounds very good and natural.
This is how KFBK sounds here nightly 2500 miles away:
Within the industry, broadcasters try to get every station in PPM markets to encode as that helps show good total Persons Using Mass Media (PUMM) which used to be Persons Using Radio. That presents radio as a more broadly used medium.
Not much different than local reception!
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