IBOC "self noise" -Article

[LinoNYC]

Well, I wasn't advocating the Italian form of radio anarchy. What they have is nuts. HD certainly won't work under those conditions. It was just a comment that if everyone was required to simultaneously change their pre-emphasis curve to the European standard of 50 us, the most FM stations could be made to sound a lot better. It would cost nothing to do other than a few minutes time.

There is nothing inherently bad about the current curve, it was designed at a time when FM was to provide high fidelity, not compacted garbage.

NPR/PRI stations can get away with slight dulling because they increasingly offer talk fare and classical music fans tend to agree with conservative, not overly bright eq.

Where all of this would fail is in the pop genre. Even if all new radios adopt this new curve, existing sets would sound dull and you could count the time in minutes before a PD or owner orders the engineer to boost the highs via the processor, we'll be right back where we are now, just from a different piece in the chain.

Brighter and louder will allways dominate in a competitive mass media.

Lino

 

[Chuck]

Well, I wasn't advocating the Italian form of radio anarchy. What they have is nuts. HD certainly won't work under those conditions. It was just a comment that if everyone was required to simultaneously change their pre-emphasis curve to the European standard of 50 us, the most FM stations could be made to sound a lot better. It would cost nothing to do other than a few minutes time.

There is nothing inherently bad about the current curve, it was designed at a time when FM was to provide high fidelity, not compacted garbage.

NPR/PRI stations can get away with slight dulling because they increasingly offer talk fare and classical music fans tend to agree with conservative, not overly bright eq.

Where all of this would fail is in the pop genre. Even if all new radios adopt this new curve, existing sets would sound dull and you could count the time in minutes before a PD or owner orders the engineer to boost the highs via the processor, we'll be right back where we are now, just from a different piece in the chain.

Brighter and louder will allways dominate in a competitive mass media.

Lino

Obviously, nobody is going to do this unless they are forced to do so by the FCC. That isn't going to happen, but the point is there exists a simple "no cost" way to improve the quality of FM radio. If that were the only goal (I know it isn't), HD sounds like a round about – and expensive - way to do it. If every station was required to change over simultaneously, the playing field would be level at that time. Since radio traditionally doesn’t like those “level playing fields” I'm sure the loudness wars would continue.

I'll be the first to admit that I've never heard anyone who comes from the "general public" complain about the sound quality of FM as it is right now. It is a problem that very few people perceive. Nonetheless, guys like Frank Foti and Bob Orban will be happy to tell you that a lot of the irritating side effects of FM processing could be improved by using less aggressive pre-emphasis.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

I was in Italy about 30 years ago, and the FM band topped out at 104 MHz. I talked to the driver, who was surprisingly fluent in English and a radio enthusiast - and he told me it was illegal to own an FM radio that received frequencies above 104 MHz - those were police band frequencies. Obviously there has been a re-allocation of frequencies in Italy since then.

 

[tomservo]

In London, the BBC actually uses 304 kHz offset between the regional transmitters at Wrotham and the urban fill-in stations at the Crystal Palace. First person to guess the significance of 304 wins a piece of swag from iBiquity, but you'll need to pay the shipping. BTW, Scott Fybush has a TSOW featuring these London sites:

http://www.fybush.com/site-020710.html

I figured it out with a little help from Google, but I'm not telling. (Mainly because I barely understand why.)

Then again, who wants any iBiquity swag, even for free?