Having both SiriusXM and HD radio in my car, I don’t know what people are smoking, but SiriusXM sounds like crap compared to HD radio. The processing used by SiriusXM makes everything sound artificial and there doesn’t seem to be a utilization of stereo sound. HD on the other hand, sounds crystal clear with surround stereo sound in my JBL speakers. That is, for the few stations that do HD radio right (the best Near me seems to be a Hubbard owned station, KDKB HD-2, playing an oldies format that is also heard on 92.7 FM).
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Hubbard Testing All-Digital AM on WWFD
- Thread starter rbc
- Start date
Having both SiriusXM and HD radio in my car, I don’t know what people are smoking, but SiriusXM sounds like crap compared to HD radio. The processing used by SiriusXM makes everything sound artificial and there doesn’t seem to be a utilization of stereo sound. HD on the other hand, sounds crystal clear with surround stereo sound in my JBL speakers. That is, for the few stations that do HD radio right (the best Near me seems to be a Hubbard owned station, KDKB HD-2, playing an oldies format that is also heard on 92.7 FM).
That's been my experience as well. I had XM back in the early days before they added MLB channels and it was… passable. But the sound quality quickly went downhill when they started their race against Sirius to add sports content.
HD can sound good but the stations need to have lossless or high bitrate audio to start with. Crappy 128 kbps mp3s will sound even worse when they've been re-encoded for HD transmission.
I've seen this mentioned time and time again. My experience in music libraries was from my time at iHeart and even dating back almost 20 years, have never known music libraries to consist of 128Kbps MP3's.
Do any stations actually play MP3's on air?
I don't actually know what they use, but I figure at least some stations do use standard mp3s.
My local iHeart stations (Mobile-Pensacola) are terrible-sounding, with that watery garbled low bitrate audio sound. Hell, maybe it's mp2 instead. It ain't anything even remotely lossless, whatever it is. iHeart is the only one running HD in my market so all their feeds sound horrific. When Cumulus had HD on a few stations — with no subchannels — they all sounded really good. Their analog audio is surprisingly clean, too, but I chalk that up to them "inheriting" good setups from Pamal and whoever else they got their stations from.
When I was a teenager living in Birmingham, I actually called the Dick Broadcasting engineer to complain about how bad the stations sounded after they went to digital music storage. He told me I was crazy and it sounded fine, so they lost me as a listener for over a decade. I guess most people don't notice, but I do and I tune out crap audio, whether it's low bitrate audio or bad audio processing (looking at you, WCSN in Orange Beach).
MP2 (MPEG-1 Layer II) is more commonly used in radio station music libraries than MP3.
MP2 was designed to be "broadcast-quality" at higher bitrates (thus why it's used for DAB in Europe) and degrades less with transcoding than MP3.
However, when clients send in pre-produced commercials to be played, they are often sent via MP3 files. I remember when they first started doing this in the late '90s, and the audio quality on many commercials was awful, because they used poor-quality encoders at low bitrates.
When a 10 gb SCSI drive was $700 back in the mid-90's when stations started moving in droves to digital storage systems, compressed music was common because storage space was so expensive. As storage became cheaper (I saw 3tb drives for under $100 yesterday) most stations began employing .wav files only.
Today, record labels distribute both 256 k MP3 and wave when they send music to stations.
Commercials are also done at high bitrates; one of the previous restrictions was bandwidth distributing uncompressed commercials to stations when high speed connections were not common.
As long as there is a MW band, there will undoubtedly be analog stations on it, if only due to the number of MW AM transmitters out there.
But digital on the MW band has its place. When two local AM band stations had IBOC on, it sounded great. There wasn't any problem with interference that I could hear.
I don't know if changing the Hybrid Digital Coding (HDC) codec would be a good idea at this point. It's already deployed. Maybe if there is a negotiation scheme in HD Radio for different codecs. I have to admit that I'm not familiar with the HD Radio protocols.
I think it would be possible for Xperi to implement a modern codec, but it creates a chicken and egg problem.
Imagine Xperi launches a new codec January 1, 2020, which is incompatible with existing receivers. There isn't enough bandwidth for a broadcaster to transmit analog, "classic HD" and "new HD", so they have to pick one codec or the other.
Given an install base of zero receivers with the new codec, broadcasters are likely to wait a while before activating the new transmission type. Which gives no one any incentive to actually implement the new codec, so the new codec may never be implemented.
I tend to think the same will happen with ATSC 3 on the TV side, BTW.
All very true.
I used to work at a company that sent out music MP2's. During the 1990's the 'standard' compression ratio (because of storage space on SCSI drives at that time) was 4:1. At that compression ratio, the artifacts weren't really heard. Any more than that (6:1, for example) you heard the squirrelies. We were told that at the station the processing would make up for any losses in fidelity by 4:1 compression.
By the time I exited the industry in the mid 2000's, we were still sending out MP2s, at 4:1, although we also began sending CDROMs to stations, loaded with WAV files to be used either for backups, or for broadcast if they so choosed. Commercials, however, were often delivered to us in grainy sounding MP3's.
Obviously, all that has changed by now. But the driver of compression was the size, expense, and storage available at that time.
This is an aside to the topic; but I think ATSC 3.0 is dead on arrival. Besides being incompatible with existing ATSC tuners, meaning OTA viewers would need to replace their existing TV's, in order for a station to have an ATSC 3.0 modulated station, stations would need a second station to keep their ATSC 1.0 programming going through any transition. Given the recent TV repack with loss of several available channels to the Mobile Industry, many major markets don't have extra channels available for transition, as with the original DTV conversion. Add-in some of the major cable providers announcing that they aren't interested in carrying stations with incompatible modulation.
Unlike the DTV conversion in 1999, there isn't the government behind this, pushing it along. The only concern of the government lately, is finding more spectrum to sell off to the highest bidder. That's why the FCC is looking at cannibalizing the C-Band satellite spectrum next.
Also, the migration of TV watching from cable channels and OTA to the internet may upset an introduction of a new TV standard.
Strangely enough, that migration is more hyperbolic than reality.
Estimates for viewers watching OTA in 1999, when the DTV transition occurred, were 19% of the total US TV viewing. Once streaming came onto the scene from companies like Roku, much of the 'cord cutting' started shifting from cable to streaming, not to OTA. Last I saw, OTA households were around 16%.
So, TV watching has migrated from OTA and cable to increased internet viewing? That is what I implied in my previous post -- that people are watching more "TV" online, and less on cable channels as well as less OTA.
PS -- 16% OTA is roughly equal to the last AM radio figures I've seen, where it was around 16% or so.
That's correct. Ironically enough, 'Cord Cutting' is actually considered as watching television programming via Internet streaming. Funny, the cord is still there.
There are indeed some who technically call cutting the cord as viewing OTA from cable, but that number has proven to be a pretty small percentage.
I suspect just as with AM listening, most of the 'cord cutting' OTA viewers are probably of a generation that remembers when the only way one could watch TV is OTA.
Increasingly, cord cutting accompanied by OTA viewing is a phenomenon of poor areas.
And among Spanish-only Hispanic viewers, there is really very little of interest on the cable channels in in the high density Hispanic markets, most everything desirable is on OTA TV. In such cases, why pay for cable?
What's left out of this is that OTA viewing bottomed out around 2009 at slightly less than 10%. So that 16% number today represents a modest rebound.
Oh, I disagree. I've seen quite a few younger people, Generation X and even Millennials, who have "discovered" free OTA TV like it's some secret that Big Cable™ doesn't want anyone knowing about. It's not so much about being old-fashioned as it is saving money. Streaming linear TV services like Sling and DirecTV Now are basically "cable, but online" with the same cost issues and lack of flexibility (commercials that can't be skipped, blackout rules, etc.) so a lot of folks are tossing up a little antenna and only having Netflix and Hulu instead.
I havent had cable tv in YEARS and im 35 years old.. im more pleased with the money im saving then upset by not having cable tv. I realized how much i was paying and how much of it i was actually watching
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