Savage said:
I note your lack of response to my comments about what's happened with HD-AM since 9/14. Readers can draw their own conclusions.
My only first hand experience with AM HD is when I drive into Dallas, and then it is based on observations using an analog radio. Some might say that isn't a valid test, but considering that 99.99+% of all radios are still analog, I think it counts for a lot.
Yesterday afternoon I drove into town, and switched my GM-Bose radio from a decent sounding AM station in Tyler to KAAM in Dallas. I couldn't believe what I heard. The fidelity was absolutely awful. It was a jarring shock going from the Tyler station that sounded "round and full." I actually had to switch back and forth a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t hearing things, thinking maybe I had tuned in when KAAM was playing some horrible sounding recording. It wasn’t.
KAAM - a music format station that runs in HD- sounded thin and brittle. There was absolutely no low end. There were no discernable highs either. All that was left was a screechy midrange with a hard to listen to peak about 3-4 KHz. Cymbals sounded like breaking glass and even voices sounded like a message left on your cell phone. Before HD, this station actually sounded pretty good on most radios. They even broadcast in C-Quam stereo.
Perhaps the HD version of KAAM sounds great. That's nice, but most people are not benefiting from this "improvement." Even though I wanted to listen, I simply couldn't stand the way this thing sounded and soon tuned into the analog version of WRR, a classical station, which sounded great.
If this is the price everyone will need to pay to make IBOC work on AM, it is simply too great. In the five or ten years it takes to get enough radios to make this worthwhile, there won't be any listeners for many of these stations. They will have gone elsewhere. There are plenty of other choices.
This looks to me like an incredibly bad business decision. Good Account Executives can probably keep things rolling for a while selling time, even if the station has a TSL of five minutes, but they can't keep juggling forever. I just don't see this working from a business point of view if the technology gets in the way. They'd do themselves a big favor if, at least for now, they'd go back to all analog.
One of KAAM's big advertisers is a hearing aid company. Maybe they are trying to drum up some business for their sponsor? ;D