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Jensen 525i now $49.95 at Radio Shack

P

phil

Quite a few stores in my area still have them in stock, I got one yesterday. I can't complain at the value: remote control, iPod dock, auxilliary input. 10 AM, 20 FM presets. The sound is not great, but I wasn't expecting it to be great.

To be honest, I was impressed with HD sound on the 3 AM stations I could receive. Much better than the average after dark analog reception on these stations. At first, I thought the AM was not there, but it takes a few seconds to lock in on the station. I wanted to test the FM subchannel for visually impaired listeners, to see if I should recommend it to a friend.

I have no prior experience with HD, other than the Insignia portable. And I can't vouch for its reliability, since I only got it yesterday. But I will recommend it for the price.
 
Seems to be a pretty decent price, everywhere else has it for around $100 or more. I wonder how it performs compared to the Sony or Sangean HD radios which are both decent units that many people DX with including myself.

Ive had mixed experience with AM HD. Putting aside the analog interference, some stations do okay with it considering they only get around 40kbps. At that low of a bitrate compression artifacts are noticable. Some stations like WFAN can have a decent sounding HD signal during sports, but others will have annoying buzzing in the background or it will dead silent in the background in between talking which I dont like. The same thing with phones happened when they went digital, you get that dead silence and you start to wonder if you lost the call or if its just silent.
 
Last time I played with a Jensen 525i was at a Radio Shack two Christmases ago (it was optimistically priced at, IIRC, $149.95 then.) I was distinctly unimpressed with the audio - but what can you expect from 4" speakers with one-ounce magnets? I didn't check to see if it had external speaker jacks. It was clunky and slow to lock in digital, and only two stations (no subs) could be received on FM .... nada on AM.

Sounded pretty much like a middling boom-box to me, like a GPX or Insignia that would sell for around $30.
 
Think of that buzzing as "comfort noise"--noise deliberately injected into a communication channel so the user knows if the channel is functional in the absence of other modulations (like voice.)

Example: When U.S. West went to ESS from the old crossbars in the early 1990s, the signal was *so* quiet, they got complaints from the users thinking their line had suddenly dropped when the people on the other end stopped talking. They started injecting a faint "white noise" into the background which is still present to this day. (Of course, during the few years our line was connected through a DMS-100, the crosstalk alone served the comfort noise purpose perfectly!)

Because of the almost non-existant noise floor of KEX's IBAC stream, a small amount of comfort noise seems almost necessary. I wish they would do that, as hearing their perfectly silent background in between sides of a conversation is quite jarring, especially if there are pauses of any considerable length.
 
For radio shows where it is voice only, I find the absence of background noise to be annoying. For the few stations that accidentally leave IBOC on during sporting events, its not that bad because the noise from the stadium makes up for the background noise absent.

I remember hearing from somebody once that when they started switching phone lines from copper to fiber-optics and digital instead of analog, customers complained about the lack of background noise. You also get this on cellphones. Its hard to tell if the call dropped or if nobody's speaking on the other end.
 
I must be in the minority, then. After several years of near-exclusive XM listening, I prefer the dead silence of a good digital audio feed over the hiss of analog FM or AM. In fact most of my post-XM listening until recently was to the local pubcaster's HD audio feed, which carried mostly news and info programming on the main channel. It was nice being able to make the drive between towns with noticeably less noise in the areas where the HD didn't drop out.
 
All RatShacks in my State are sold out, according to their computers, that is. So there's at least the potential for another 50 HD listeners now!
 
spunker88 said:
...customers complained about the lack of background noise.
Click to expand...
No, nobody complained about a lack of background noise. It never happened.
 
Zach said:
I must be in the minority, then
Click to expand...
I, too!
We remember tuning to the beeb on our very first day with XM and thinking, "no qrm, no qrn, no qsb, wow, its a direct studio feed from Bush House straight to the car radio, not the world service we remember", and loving it.
 
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