RadioDoogie said:
I know that we need to move into the future away from analog and into digital.
I agree that the FCC needs to mandate HD tuners be implemented into all Radios like UHF and DTV.
If the HD radio technology is not the solution for terrestrial radio, then what technology will work?
I know HD works similarly to the way TDMA and CDMA did back in the late 90s where your cell phone would stay in the same band but would lock into digital where available and drop to analog when the digital was not there.
Is the solution to mandate the tuners and eventually sunset analog like Tv did in 2009?
I think HD sounds great and works great but if the FCC does not get behind this, I fear it may be doomed.
Most of the people I talk to don't even know what HD radio is.
There is no such thing as digital. In the real world, it is ALL analog or RF. Digital just switches between two states. Those transitions are governed by voltage levels, bounce, and overshoot. Digital this and digital that seems to be the mantra for everything. Digital does NOT automatically equate to "better". It only adds complexity to the decode.
NTSC was very poor quality, and nothing was going to ever improve it. So a switch to digital transmission made sense - a very noticable increase in quality. Not so with HD radio. Analog radio was never broken. Nothing except extremely high end audio systems can even tell the difference between analog and digital FM. And you lose that advantage completely when you have HD-2, then the HD-1 and HD-2 are little better than analog is now. The only compelling aspect of HD FM are the subchannels, but broadcasters have not stepped up with compelling formats, only minor variations of their HD-1 or at best a discarded former format. AM traded one really bad problem for a completely different problem with HD - AM now sounds like streaming audio at best. It is bad enough on talk radio When you try HD AM for music, the problem is acute.
Mandating a switch to digital would mean a massive obsolescence of radios, especially in cars. There is probably no "converter box" that the government can subsidize that would work in cars, and one or two per household like they did for TV would not be enough. The radio industry would be fools to push for a mandate, because when the shutdown occurred, they would lose a massive portion of their audience overnight - an audience that once it went to satellite, streaming, iWhatevers, Pandora, etc. would never come back to radio.
So - what system would work? HD, in principle, was a good idea. Where they lost it was when they attempted to salvage all existing subchannel services and put the sidebands over adjacent frequencies. The RF designers forgot one thing - the gain / bandwidth product. If you took the present sidebands and moved them in towards the FM subcarrier, sacrificing stuff like RDS, whose functionality is done better in HD anyway, then you would end up with a system much narrower in bandwidth, one that wouldn't be subject to interference from first adjacents on skip, one that nobody would complain is jamming first adjacents, and one that utilizes the narrower bandwidth to achieve greater range by taking advantage of higher gain that happens when you lower bandwidth in receivers. I am hoping this could be done with simple re-programming of existing transmitters and receivers. The time would be now before things get any worse than they are now, if possible.
As for AM, HD lucked out when some receivers can decode C-Quam. C-Quam, with its faults, still worked. The HD people could announce they have "solved" HD-AM, make everything C-Quam. It would sound great, the range would be fantastic, it would be in stereo, there are still a lot of C-Quam receivers in cars. Almost NOBODY would realize it is a repackaged AMax - iBiquity's pride would be restored, noise on the AM band wouldn't cause stations to lose lock, HD noise would be eliminated, and everybody would be happy. True, it wouldn't be "digital", but consumers would never know, they would only know it sounds better and actually works. Maybe they could phase modulate that 20 Hz tone to display call letters and song titles or something.
Most people really don't know what HD radio is - as you said. And when they do hear about it, they are not sold on the benefits. Word of mouth spreads about it not working very well. I've suggested a couple of simple fixes that would cost virtually nothing and offer a real chance to the system. But you can add those to your list of things that will never happen.
