IBOCRocks said:
dumber than a box of hair said:
Mike Walker said:
I've subscribed to high end audio magazines all of my adult life. The "sales figures" for some of the products they review aren't thousands, or even hundreds, but dozens (how many people do you think buy a 20,000 dollar tube amplifier? But I don't care. I can't afford it anyway. The point is...WHAT DOES IT SOUND LIKE?
Excellent question. Too bad that article doesn't say anything about it. The (alleged) author of the article doesn't even try to disguise the fact that he's copying from a press release. There's no evidence that he has listened to it himself, and the only people he quotes are one manufacturer's PR rep and one person from the HD Alliance. Too bad, too...The New York Times used to have top-notch audio equipment reviewers who actually listened to the products they wrote about. The Times also used to consider it a major taboo to merely rewrite a press release without doing their own investigation. How Times have changed.
Funny, PocketRadio (700WLW, AnalogAMForever, etc.) and SuperSound have openly admitted to not having really tried an HD radio, and yet...
Meanwhile, several people here who have bought the radios come by to talk about how great they are.
The things that make you go "hmmmmmm".
By try do you mean "buy"?
For some people, like myself, this is a MORALITY issue.
I have tried it in a store, 2 miles from 2 50 kw AM IBOCs.
The AMs decoded, but only 1 FM weakly in analog. (BA Receptor in Schaumburg)
Also the Accurian, tested in Houston, where 5 FMs decoded, 2 poorly, but no AMs
I have learned since 1970 what to expect from store reception, and how to interpret it.
I would not buy one from a personal integrity perspective.
For me, it would be like saying, "Well, the government has legalized cocaine and crack, so I guess I'll pick up the habit."
I don't gamble, but it's legal.
I don't go to Nevada for "ahem", but it's legal.
Neither would I let one dollar of my money in any way support a system so in opposition to every tenet of
good RF engineering I ever learned or have practiced.
My money is earned in making analog and digital systems work together, new, used, and troubleshooting
both types of systems.
I feel IBOC is an unruly, and poorly applied method in MW AM.
I can live with its effects on FM ( OK, it makes it a little fuzzy if I have headphones on).
OK, the stereo doesn't work anymore on some stations. I can live with that.
I will buy the system for FM when and only when ibiquity learns their lesson and abandons this atrocity on AM.
Radio=maxwellian theory=magnetism, etc, see hysteresis loop diagram, consider data rate, wave squareness,
and distortions from multipath and impulse noises, now factor in distortion from change in propogation velocity in antenna vs. free space,
twice (xmit and rec) a very serious consideration at even low data rates.
This scheme surely was hatched by computer people, not radio people.
I should like to send some overpowering analog into their digital life.
I work in digital and analog, and there are appropriate uses for both.