Insignia Portable HD on Back Order

[clouseau]

Best Buy reports the Insignia Portable HD radio is on back order at bestbuy.com.

http://www.radioworld.com/article/84662

Funny how this goes unposted for almost a whole day here. Almost like there was a bias?

Clouseau

 

[XavierRenegade]

I went to our local Best Buy Store. I asked if they had the Portable HD radio and they told me where it was and I found it. They had 2 in stock so I know our store has them. I know I looked a couple of weeks ago on the Best Buy Website and the radios were back ordered meaning it would take 1-2 weeks to get them in. They also were listed as sold out at all the stores i checked in the LA area.

Now the radio seems to be available at most stores. Last time I checked the Woodland Hills location in Los Angeles was the only location that was listed where the radio is sold out. All the other locations seemed to have the radio in stock.

 

[stacker]

If there is finally some market demand here, I would love to see the facts. How many units were stocked? How many sold? How many have been sold waiting on back order? If you take every Best Buy store in the US and multiply it by 2 units, that's not very many.

Low expectations are easy to exceed.

I could put my "cold fusion" solution on sale today, but it would be on "back order."

 

[mmnassour]

It looks like the backorder is web-only. Apparently, those stores that got them have stuffed them back in the back where few personnel can find them. It took three different blue-shirts to find mine.

 

[Chuck]

A friend who used to work at Best Buy tells me that most stores stock SKU's about six deep. I'm sure there are exception to that in high volume stores. On the other hand, in these uncertain economic times, the number may be lower.

How many Best Buy's are there? Multiply that by 6 to get a good idea of how many radios we are really talking about. If you want to be generous, multiply by ten.

I'll bet that the web site reflects what is in their warehouses as back stock. If that is the case, then they didn't order much back stock.

No matter what the number, it is a drop in the bucket compared with the number of analog radios already in service.

 

[Savage]

If Chuck's figures are accurate - I for one certainly find them credible - it wouldn't be hard to see how, given radio industry hype about the supposed coming flood of "personal portable" HD radios, a large percentage of Insignia "personal-portable" sales actually are due to radio professionals buying them. There are hundreds of radio employees in most markets of any size (despite the recent rounds of layoffs.) They could easily deplete most of a stock of armband portables in a single wave of "curiosity" shopping when the regional stock of the items likely only totals a few hundred.

Closed-circuit for Clouseau: once again, people come here to express opinions. I guess you could call that "bias" if you want to take a little semantics tour. If you want to go there, everybody posting here has a "bias" - including you.

 

[mmnassour]

I'd like to know the return rate.

 

[hubcity]

If Chuck's figures are accurate - I for one certainly find them credible - it wouldn't be hard to see how, given radio industry hype about the supposed coming flood of "personal portable" HD radios, a large percentage of Insignia "personal-portable" sales actually are due to radio professionals buying them. There are hundreds of radio employees in most markets of any size (despite the recent rounds of layoffs.) They could easily deplete most of a stock of armband portables in a single wave of "curiosity" shopping when the regional stock of the items likely only totals a few hundred.

Closed-circuit for Clouseau: once again, people come here to express opinions. I guess you could call that "bias" if you want to take a little semantics tour. If you want to go there, everybody posting here has a "bias" - including you.

It's a fair cop (though I'm less of a professional now than I used to be.) Though the lunchtime conversation the day I bought it was interesting, and seemed to hinge more on the fact that there were more stations to choose from than the increase in sound quality.

Me, I've got cognitive dissonance going for me now - I do think the radio's pretty good. I can also think of lots of ways the service can be improved, though, and it really does seem as though this was a compromise. HD2 and HD3s should be receivable, solidly, in the entire service area of the original FM signal, and I'm surprised broadcasters settled for anything less.

 

[Play Freebird]

Me, I've got cognitive dissonance going for me now - I do think the radio's pretty good. I can also think of lots of ways the service can be improved, though, and it really does seem as though this was a compromise. HD2 and HD3s should be receivable, solidly, in the entire service area of the original FM signal, and I'm surprised broadcasters settled for anything less.

You are correct, it is a compromise. I think most knowledgeable engineers anticipated problems with an in-band hybrid approach. When the system was originally designed, there were no plans to offer HD-2 or HD-3 services. The only audio channel was to have been "HD-1" with the FM analog serving as a backup, so there was less concern at that time about digital signal dropouts.

As I recall, the "big guys" in commercial radio who demanded this system (rather than an out of band approach) actually didn't want any improvement in coverage -- they wanted to maintain the status quo, not to level the playing field. They owned the beachfront property and didn't want the little guys getting a leg up. They seemed to think ancillary data would be IBOC's killer app -- for example, stock quotes, sports scores, traffic, etc. I remember reading an article about "bits for bucks"; how we were all going to make big money selling data services. Yeah, right.

NPR came up with the idea of providing secondary audio channels. As you probably know, many public stations split their formats between classical music, news, jazz and other niche offerings, so NPR saw multicasting as a way to keep most everyone happy most of the time. Then it dawned on the big guys that their listeners wouldn't spend money on new receivers to hear the same programming that was already available in analog, so most of the commercial groups decided to go along with the multicasting idea. But of them few knew what to offer that would avoid diluting the audience of the main channel. This may explain why more of them are now offering simulcasts of their co-owned AM stations.

The problem with turning up the digital power above one percent is that this will violate the recognized occupied bandwidth rules and spill over into adjacent channels. Again, I suspect most engineers know this will cause trouble, but they must answer to superiors who are getting desperate.

 

[hubcity]

Then it dawned on the big guys that their listeners wouldn't spend money on new receivers to hear the same programming that was already available in analog, so most of the commercial groups decided to go along with the multicasting idea. But of them few knew what to offer that would avoid diluting the audience of the main channel. This may explain why more of them are now offering simulcasts of their co-owned AM stations.

For me, that's been the overarching feature of HD radio - the doubling/tripling of the signals in the market, and the ability to appeal to niches that nobody's willing to serve on the main channels. Alternative Rock is my bailiwick, and the lack of it on the commercial dial is what got me to spring the $50 for the Insignia. (Given there's no pure alternative station on the commercial dial in NYC, this seems the right way to drive takeup - of course, it's all clear to me because I'm not trying to make ends meet with my primary signal.)

 

[Savage]

There's an interesting sidebar to the near-term sellout of the limited-availability Insignia "personal portable" HD receiver and the much (and deservedly) maligned ongoing HD Radio promos which have blanketed Alliance stations for over two years now.

Any first-year marketing student knows one of the best-known tenets of the trade, which goes (paraphrasing);

"The best and fastest way to kill a bad product is to advertise it heavily."

Think about THAT concept - and all of HD's attendant technical woes (HD-AM! -20 dBc! -14 dbc?? -16 dbc?? WTF???) and the endlessly repetitive and often insultingly inept ad campaign.

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