S
SayNoToIBOC
Guest
DX LISTENING DIGEST 6-094, June 28, 2006
"U.S.A. WCBS DUMPS IBOC, RETURNS TO 'HIGH DEFINITION' AM"
After less than a week of transmitting the IBOC buzz, NYC's 880 WCBS
has returned to "High Definition" analog AM with crisp, clear 10 kHz
audio. A possible reason for this may be the numerous complaints they
received due to the 8-1/2 second delay the IBOC exciter added to their
audio, which made their Yankees play-by-play out of synch for people
listening at the game or while watching it on TV. I first noticed the
IBOC hash generator was off during a Yankees game today, but now
during normal "Newsradio" programming it is still off, and their audio
sounds a lot better too.
When they had the IBOC on, their analog audio was still pretty crisp
(they had it in 8 kHz bandwidth mode) but it had a strange kind of
clipping distortion which made the announcers sound like they were
holding their nose while they spoke, and for an all-news format that
can get rather annoying. There was also some rather obvious slack in
the AGC; when jumping from one programming element to the next, the
audio would often start out very quiet and gradually ramp up in level.
With their old processing (Optimod 9100?) now back in service, there
is still a little gain-riding in these instances but it is a lot
smoother and all of that nasty distortion is gone. And of course on a
wideband receiver there is no mistaking that beautiful full-bandwidth
audio! (Kevin Tekel, June 28, BC radiolist via Bill Harms, DXLD)
"U.S.A. WCBS DUMPS IBOC, RETURNS TO 'HIGH DEFINITION' AM"
After less than a week of transmitting the IBOC buzz, NYC's 880 WCBS
has returned to "High Definition" analog AM with crisp, clear 10 kHz
audio. A possible reason for this may be the numerous complaints they
received due to the 8-1/2 second delay the IBOC exciter added to their
audio, which made their Yankees play-by-play out of synch for people
listening at the game or while watching it on TV. I first noticed the
IBOC hash generator was off during a Yankees game today, but now
during normal "Newsradio" programming it is still off, and their audio
sounds a lot better too.
When they had the IBOC on, their analog audio was still pretty crisp
(they had it in 8 kHz bandwidth mode) but it had a strange kind of
clipping distortion which made the announcers sound like they were
holding their nose while they spoke, and for an all-news format that
can get rather annoying. There was also some rather obvious slack in
the AGC; when jumping from one programming element to the next, the
audio would often start out very quiet and gradually ramp up in level.
With their old processing (Optimod 9100?) now back in service, there
is still a little gain-riding in these instances but it is a lot
smoother and all of that nasty distortion is gone. And of course on a
wideband receiver there is no mistaking that beautiful full-bandwidth
audio! (Kevin Tekel, June 28, BC radiolist via Bill Harms, DXLD)