NYTimes: "HD Radio Crying Out to Be Heard"

[dumber than a box of hair]

Q: How do you make an HD radio executive bang his head against the wall?

A: Ask him, “What’s HD radio?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/technology/personaltech/09pogue.html

 

[SUPERCASTER]

From the article link above:

To get a wider sampling, I asked my 100,000 Twitter followers if they’d tried HD radio. Sixteen people responded.

Wow, after years of continuous massive bombardment promotion by the HD cartel only 16 out of 100,000 even TRIED it?

I wonder how few out of that number actually BOUGHT an HD radio and regularly LISTEN to it tuned to HD stations?

That explains the five Twitter pals who independently mentioned that they listen to Internet radio more than HD radio these days, especially on the iPhone.

There is the answer.

The light might be (dimly) on, but no one is home.

 

[Savage]

"Crying out to be heard?" I've heard HD. It's more like whining. And then there's this annoying HISSSSS....

 

[Carmine5]

"The marketing doesn’t lie: HD radio really does sound better than regular radio. AM loses the tinniness."

What Pogue apparently hasn't lost (or maybe just recently gained) is a tin ear if he thinks HD Radio sounds dramatically better. Of course, the features he swoons over; iTunes tagging, information displays, side channels, pay-per-view audio events, is typical of a gadget head. I doubt the average consumer cares about any of it. For that matter, have consumers ever made a big deal about RDS?

But, in the end, even Pogue and his five Twitter pals have to acknowledge that it's the programming that attract people to wherever it is they want to go be it terrestrial, internet or satellite radio. And has Pogue says, "...these days, few stations have the money or manpower to work on HD (side) channels."

C5

 

[mimo]

"The marketing doesn’t lie: HD radio really does sound better than regular radio. AM loses the tinniness."

Honestly, I've never thought of AM as being "tinny". Maybe on a pocket radio, but FM sounds just as bad, if not worse on a pocket radio because of the frequency response. If anything AM is more Bass and Midrange, just the way I like it. To me, FM is way to0 trebbly.

 

[Savage]

Another parrot cackling the typical talking points. How many times have we heard AM as being described as "tinny?" I don't know about every AM station but I know that my TX, phasor, audio system and four-tower directional antenna are pretty flat down to 50 Hz and pass 10 kHz. If the FCC would let me I could open it up to 15 kHz.....

Oh, wait! That wouldn't be FAIR TO OTHER BROADCASTERS!! The ADJACENT-CHANNEL SPLASH might prove HARMFUL TO MY NEIGHBORS.....(like WBZ-AM, spectrum-hogs of 50 kHz of the AM dial!)

The only AM stations I've noticed which have squished audio with no highs, no lows and no presence would be....those transmitting HD. The local Crawford AM on 990 kHz (don't know what callsign they're using this week) easily ranks as the worst-sounding AM signal I've ever heard, with the exception of a daytimer I once heard in Troy, PA which was using a dial-up phone coupler for an STL. (And yes, they were playing music...)

 

[Carmine5]

Oh, wait! That wouldn't be FAIR TO OTHER BROADCASTERS!! The ADJACENT-CHANNEL SPLASH might prove HARMFUL TO MY NEIGHBORS.....(like WBZ-AM, spectrum-hogs of 50 kHz of the AM dial!)

So what are you saying? That the FCC is hypocritical? Nawwww...

Many of us here remember a time when AM sounded great, like mono FM, which makes this feature particularly irritating:

"...the Polk radio’s design is so clever: when it tunes into an HD radio station, it first plays a couple of seconds of the regular station before kicking into HD. That way, you keep saying, “Wow, what a difference! Sure glad I bought that radio!”"

First, mandate that the AM signal be gutted like a fish and constricted to a 5 kHz or less bandwidth and then attach noise-generating HD side bands.

Sure. Anything, short of Edison's wax cylinders, is going to sound great after that.

C5

 

[Savage]

Funny you should mention Edison cylinders, Carmine.....once upon a time I was a collector and student of early recorded media, dating back to the brown-wax 2-minute cylinder era of 110 years ago.

In 1912 Edison debuted an "improved" cylinder called the "Blue Amberol" which had a very smooth plastic (celluloid) surface pressed over a plaster-of-Paris core. The vertically-cut grooves were played by a counterbalanced sapphire "button" stylus and a feedscrew propelled the pickup across the smooth celluloid surface so there was virtually no friction and no wear. Unlike the shellac laterally-cut 78rpm records the industry used until the 1950s, there was no abrasive mixed into the pressed record material so the Blue Amberol cylinders were amazingly quiet.

The cylinder grooves were so identical in dimension and cross-section to modern LP records that you can jerry-rig a stereo magnetic cartridge installed on your Edison Amberola or Standard springwound phonograph and play the Blue Amberol cylinders through contemporary stereo systems (you have to use a stereo, not mono, cartridge because the cylinders were vertically-cut. Stereo LPs are half lateral and half vertical.)

When you do this, you encounter an amazing listening experience. The Blue Amberol cylinders were so technically superior to any other recording medium of the era....and the better examples exhibit audio quality of excellence which is truly eerie. Only the artist material suggests you're listening to a 90-year old recording. The presence and naturalness can be jaw-dropping.

Thus I would argue: Edison Blue Amberol cylinders (made until Edison went out of business in 1929) sound superior to HD Radio. They don't have a lot of bass because of the limitations of the acoustic recording process but the human voice and solo instrument reproduction rivals tape and disc of the 1950s and 1960s.

 

[KB1OKL]

Also acoustic basses are generally the quietest instrument in any orchestra which is another reason you can barely hear them in old recordings even those done with some kind of electronic microphone placement, virtually all acoustic bass players nowadays use some kind of amplifier in live settings. The bass was virtually never heard until the early 50's on recordings that I know of anyway.

 

[KB1OKL]

Q: How do you make an HD radio executive bang his head against the wall?

A: Ask him, “What’s HD radio?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/technology/personaltech/09pogue.html

There was some funny business going on there too. They shut down reader commentary for a couple of hours during the middle of the day (it was almost uniformly negative), then it was enabled again early afternoon. I e-mailed this which would have been #43:

Q: How do you make a new HD radio owner bang his head against the wall?

A: Ask him to demonstrate it.

It was never published and comments stopped at #42 and comments had been enabled when I sent it in. I say if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Tom Taylor also reported on the article, I wrote something in to him and he may follow it up next week and asked if he could use a quote of mine. Tom's article was yesterday also, he invites reader response.

 

[Carmine5]

Funny you should mention Edison cylinders, Carmine.....once upon a time I was a collector and student of early recorded media, dating back to the brown-wax 2-minute cylinder era of 110 years ago.

In 1912 Edison debuted an "improved" cylinder called the "Blue Amberol" which had a very smooth plastic (celluloid) surface pressed over a plaster-of-Paris core. The vertically-cut grooves were played by a counterbalanced sapphire "button" stylus and a feedscrew propelled the pickup across the smooth celluloid surface so there was virtually no friction and no wear. Unlike the shellac laterally-cut 78rpm records the industry used until the 1950s, there was no abrasive mixed into the pressed record material so the Blue Amberol cylinders were amazingly quiet.

The cylinder grooves were so identical in dimension and cross-section to modern LP records that you can jerry-rig a stereo magnetic cartridge installed on your Edison Amberola or Standard springwound phonograph and play the Blue Amberol cylinders through contemporary stereo systems (you have to use a stereo, not mono, cartridge because the cylinders were vertically-cut. Stereo LPs are half lateral and half vertical.)

When you do this, you encounter an amazing listening experience. The Blue Amberol cylinders were so technically superior to any other recording medium of the era....and the better examples exhibit audio quality of excellence which is truly eerie. Only the artist material suggests you're listening to a 90-year old recording. The presence and naturalness can be jaw-dropping.

Thus I would argue: Edison Blue Amberol cylinders (made until Edison went out of business in 1929) sound superior to HD Radio. They don't have a lot of bass because of the limitations of the acoustic recording process but the human voice and solo instrument reproduction rivals tape and disc of the 1950s and 1960s.

Fascinating, Mr. Savage. I had never heard of Blue Amberol cylinders.

The reason I was thinking about Edison's wax cylinders was because of a conversation some of my peers in the television industry and I were having a few days ago concerning the storage, preservation and retrieval of today's digital assets.

Apparently, there is no long term strategy for such storage and that the audio content on Edison's cylinders was in a better position for preservation then what we have now for digital content. Scary thought.

C5

 

[hipporadio]

AM radio SOUNDS GREAT when presented by a modern facility, thru a good tuner... [a MEDUCI]. As I listen to my Meduci, I am loving the “better-than-FM” audio experience-be-it in mono.

 

[johnbasalla]

I collect all kinds of "antique audio", including cylinders. When in good shape, Blue Amberol Cylinders sound very good. The best are the first 2 years worth (1912 - 1914). In September, 1914, in order to save money on recording, Thomas Edison gave the go ahead for the dubbing of disc masters to make new cylinder masters instead of recording directly to cylinder. By this time Edison's vertically cut Diamond Discs had been around about 2 years as well. The first dubbed cylinders went on sale in January, 1915. There was no announcement of this, but discerning listeners noticed the drop in quality of the Blue Amberol cylinders and declared them "damnberols". This rather officially made the cylinder a secondary product. Over 100 disc masters that were deemed not worthy of being released on the Diamond Discs were considered good enough for cylinder and were available only in cylinder form. Even so, in one way the cylinders could still be better then the discs. The discs had problems with surface noise, particularly during World War I when war-time rationing and unavailability of better foreign sources forced Thomas Edison, Inc. to use inferior domestic material to make the discs. I have a bell solo cylinder in perfect shape and the sound is exquisite.

If you are at all interested in hearing a weekly radio program of antique audio, go to www.wbwc.com/1900 or www.wbwc.com, then click on "Specialty Shows", then "1900 Yesterday" and you'll find archived editions of the series. You can hear it as it is broadcast every Sunday at 5:02pm by clicking on the listen live or now link.

 

[Savage]

Yes, John, phenol was a vital ingredient in the manufacture of the Diamond Discs (thickness more than 1/4"!) and the supply dried up during WW One, but IIRC the cause was a fire that destroyed the Edison factory for making the material.....?

No question, the Blue Amberol cylinders sounded better as a general rule than the Diamond Discs, which had ongoing surface noise problems. The cylinders were much quieter, and I thought they had more naturalness as well.

It's amazing that Edison conducted repeated blind live audience testing of the Diamond Disc machines, called "tone-tests," on stage in major metropolitan areas, and audiences couldn't tell the difference between a 1916 acoustic phonograph and live voices and instruments!

Try THAT with HD-AM Radio today. :

 

[hipporadio]

AM isn’t “tinny”—given an agile and capable tuner [you know the brand from my prior posts]. If Jeff Deck can build an exceptional HI-FIDELITY AM tuner on a bench in his back-bedroom, WHY can't Sony?

For goodness sake, the Meduci is a “project”—that performs! You would think that the corporate consumer electronics biz could do much better! This ISN’T “rocket science”—it’s the oldest form of transmission/demod on our blue planet.

As I type this, I’m listening to Charlie Tuna’s ‘70s show on a 250-watt “pocket rocket” and IT SOUNDS AWESOME—courtesy of a modern BE rig and Omnia proc... That’s all it takes, folks - no "HD" required!

 

[oldiesfan6479]

There was some funny business going on there too. They shut down reader commentary for a couple of hours during the middle of the day (it was almost uniformly negative)...(snip)...I say if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

We know the NYT is in a less than ideal financial situation. Perhaps the perps
at iCRAPuity saw the scathing comments piling up and offered the -30- folks
a "nice honorarium from the, uh, student fund" in exchange for shutting down
any further reader commentary?

And the Boston Globe (now your "HD newspaper") lives for another month!

Just wild speculation on my part of course.

 

[hipporadio]

You can't "bet your life" on anything the NY Times publishes on their paper "bird cage liner". 'Better make good use of your God-given ears, then get back to us "HD Radio" may be "over", but the NYT is hardly the venue to report its obit... This site is far more credible for "broadcast news"!

 

[johnbasalla]

Edison Diamond Discs made after 1920 - '21 and still in good shape, usually don't have too much surface noise. On Dance Band recordings, which are louder just because of what they are, you don't even notice the surface noise often. Seems kinda funny talking about Edison records that went out of business after October 29, 1929 on a board about HD radio, so let me do the right thing and ask a general question that still impacts HD radio.

Could part of the problem with the growth of interest in HD radio be ... well ... how much media do people really need out there? There's so much out there right now you'd think some of it would necessarily have trouble gaining recognition. With over the air radio, internet radio, satellite radio, ipods, how much more do you want to cut the listener pie up? Could it get to a point where the main over the air station is hurt by loss of listeners to their HD sister station? Like if a Classic Rock station has a "Deep" Classic Rock format on HD or a Contemporary Country station runs a Country Gold format on theirs. Maybe they don't get enough proven listenership on the HD station to sell spots for more then a pittance, but then they lose a little in the ratings of their main over-the-air station, and have a tougher time selling spots there.

 

[KB1OKL]

Edison Diamond Discs made after 1920 - '21 and still in good shape, usually don't have too much surface noise. On Dance Band recordings, which are louder just because of what they are, you don't even notice the surface noise often. Seems kinda funny talking about Edison records that went out of business after October 29, 1929 on a board about HD radio, so let me do the right thing and ask a general question that still impacts HD radio.

Could part of the problem with the growth of interest in HD radio be ... well ... how much media do people really need out there? There's so much out there right now you'd think some of it would necessarily have trouble gaining recognition. With over the air radio, internet radio, satellite radio, ipods, how much more do you want to cut the listener pie up? Could it get to a point where the main over the air station is hurt by loss of listeners to their HD sister station? Like if a Classic Rock station has a "Deep" Classic Rock format on HD or a Contemporary Country station runs a Country Gold format on theirs. Maybe they don't get enough proven listenership on the HD station to sell spots for more then a pittance, but then they lose a little in the ratings of their main over-the-air station, and have a tougher time selling spots there.

I listen to a Boston main FM classic rock station, it's not too bad ,good jocks at least and pretty good music although fairly predictable. They have a blues show on Sunday mornings which is pretty good and again a good interesting jock that knows what he's talking about. They are trying to replicate this blues show of their secondary channel and it's just not the same grows very tiresome after a while (the numerous drop puts don't help either). So I stick to listening to their analog main channel in my car and at home when I do listen to them, their main channel's sound in HD is nothing to write home about either, their analog signal sounds better. But hey this is another one of those stations that like to bang their heads against the wall and brag that they broadcast in HD!!! even though they probably have all of 100 listeners in the state of MA if they're lucky and I'm being generous.

 

[hipporadio]

Analog FM is a challenge, KB—it’s that nasty little 75us pre—emphasis curve. FACT IS... Audio delivered from a modern-transmitted AM STATION IS BETTER! Witness 1580 WIFE where “Bob On The Job" has delivered an exceptional OTA product!

As I type this, I’m listening on a Sangean WR-2 table radio—GREAT AM AUDIO—even though it’s digitally tuned [yep, the Meduci is in “rest”]... I’ll fire it up later today