PEW RESEARCH POLL: HD RADIO "PROSPECTS IN DOUBT"

[Savage]

Pew Research has published the answer to a question I asked here in the past few days: just how many recent HD station conversions have there been? A: In 2011, a whopping 17 stations added HD. In 2010, it was 21.

The poll adds the ominous note that 51% of respondents were "aware of digital radio," but that the number "interested in HD Radio" never exceeded 8% during the period 2006-2010. It's currently slid to 7%. No comment from The Stroob's Merry Men at iBiquity.

The survey also cites the total pop-count of HD stations at 2103, AM & FM, which is doubtless based on iBiquity's inflated estimates. I would bet that means the actual total number has declined over the past two years. It certainly has on AM, where the claimed pop-count is almost 50% higher than reality.

Add that to Sangean's exit, leaving only - maybe - COBY and Best Buy's Insignia for available HD receivers. Bye bye...

 

[gosmith123]

Checking the FCC database, the number for FM is 1,711 converted. There should be a database for HD Stations that have turned off their signals.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

Checking the FCC database, the number for FM is 1,711 converted. There should be a database for HD Stations that have turned off their signals.

If it doesn't generate revenue, that number will slowly dwindle away to nothing over the coming years.

 

[Barry]

Since there are virtually no more HD home receivers, and perhaps one or two portables, installs by car manufacturers may be the remaining hope for HD radio.
I had an opportunity to ride in someone's new BMW, with factory installed HD. This appears to be HD radio done right. We tried out a few HD stations. They sounded very good, and there were only 2 momentary dropouts during several hours of driving. As technological advances tend to trickle down from luxury cars to ordinary ones, perhaps that will be the case with the HD receive technology found in BMW's.

 

[Savage]

But, Barry - was the difference between the analog and the digital signal sufficiently dramatic to impress the average listener? I'm a radio pro with 45 years of tinkering/adjusting/critical monitoring experience and it's hard for ME to tell much difference. It's nothing like the difference between analog and HDTV.

Also, I don't know what area you were driving through, but in rugged hilly areas and in the congested metros of the Northeast, terrain and interference severely limit performance - no matter how expensive the system.

 

[satech]

Pew Research has published the answer to a question I asked here in the past few days: just how many recent HD station conversions have there been? A: In 2011, a whopping 17 stations added HD. In 2010, it was 21.

And I still hear HD Radio promo ads saying "they're adding new channels all the time!". Of course they're referring to the HD2 and HD3 channels, but even so, most FM HD stations have been transmitting those for years; and given the limited bandwidth, there's not much room for growth, unless they want to drastically reduce the quality of all the channels by squeezing in an HD4 channel.

 

[ddsparxx]

Checking the FCC database, the number for FM is 1,711 converted. There should be a database for HD Stations that have turned off their signals.

If it doesn't generate revenue, that number will slowly dwindle away to nothing over the coming years.

In fact, there is one FM station in my area that just turned on HD.

 

[gosmith123]

Since there are virtually no more HD home receivers, and perhaps one or two portables, installs by car manufacturers may be the remaining hope for HD radio.
I had an opportunity to ride in someone's new BMW, with factory installed HD. This appears to be HD radio done right. We tried out a few HD stations. They sounded very good, and there were only 2 momentary dropouts during several hours of driving. As technological advances tend to trickle down from luxury cars to ordinary ones, perhaps that will be the case with the HD receive technology found in BMW's.

How do you explain the fact that BMW has had an outstanding Technical Service Bulletin against HD Radio since 2007? Also, Volvo has had the same TSB since 2009. Complaints start out as internal Service Bulletins, then excalate to TSBs when complaints hit critical-mass. This happened to HD Radio since it was installed as standard with these automakers. A some point, I would expect more TSBs to come from the other automakers, but in most cases, HD was installed as standard in a few select vehicles, or in expensive navigation and Sync-type systems. iBiquity may attempt a fraudulent IPO, as Struble and Jury have stated that HD Radio has reached critical-mass with the automakers.

 

[RadioPhillyFan]

Every FM station in the Philadelphia market runs HD... Every. Even noncommercials. Fact, only one doesn't. 106.9 WKDN, which may end up with it's purchase by Merlin Media to run it. Multiple AM do as well.

Same for Wilmington, as of WJBR's convert and WUVD's addition of HD-2.

 

[Barry]

But, Barry - was the difference between the analog and the digital signal sufficiently dramatic to impress the average listener? I'm a radio pro with 45 years of tinkering/adjusting/critical monitoring experience and it's hard for ME to tell much difference. It's nothing like the difference between analog and HDTV.

Also, I don't know what area you were driving through, but in rugged hilly areas and in the congested metros of the Northeast, terrain and interference severely limit performance - no matter how expensive the system.

We drove from Hicksville NY, on Long Island, to Yorktown Heights NY, and back. In that area there is only one very weak distant signal from a country music station on conventional FM frequencies. When we listened to it, there was lots of hiss, and interference. As we both like the music, I suggested WLTW HD2, which carries Clear Channel's commercial-free Country Road. The audio in the vehicle was excellent, and sounded clean. Stereo separation was especially good. In each direction we had one brief dropout by the toll booths of a bridge, and one in hilly northern Westchester County.
So the audio may not have been much different from a strong FM signal, but it was a huge improvement over the only receivable country station on standard FM.

 

[RadioPhillyFan]

Also, HDTV -

All major three, Verzion Fios, Centurylink Prism and Comcast Xfinity run 720p, the human eye should not be able to tell the difference. I am against Verizon and FiOS due to my horrible past experiences with them and I am with Xfinity for it's improved speed over FiOS. I am hoping to get Centurylink as soon as it is available.

As for radio, HD Radio carrys sound much better, it's only noticable in headsets and high quality car speakers. Some stations have better HD then others.

Example - WISX-HD (106.1) sounds better then WRDW-HD (96.5) in Philadelphia.

 

[spunker88]

Analog FM sounds better than HD any day. HD can use a higher sampling rate usually 44khz which will give a maximum frequency of around 20-22khz. Analog FM is stuck at 15khz. But there is very little that this extra 5khz brings. HD Radio and other lossy digital audio compression methods sound sharper and clearer, but give off many noticeable artifacts. It probably depends on the music format you like but I notice annoying artifacts accompany percussion instruments like drums and cymbals. This isn't just HD Radio's AAC derived codec, but also MP3 and any other lower bitrate digital audio format.

 

[tomservo]

How do you explain the fact that BMW has had an outstanding Technical Service Bulletin against HD Radio since 2007? Also, Volvo has had the same TSB since 2009. Complaints start out as internal Service Bulletins, then excalate to TSBs when complaints hit critical-mass. This happened to HD Radio since it was installed as standard with these automakers. A some point, I would expect more TSBs to come from the other automakers, but in most cases, HD was installed as standard in a few select vehicles, or in expensive navigation and Sync-type systems. iBiquity may attempt a fraudulent IPO, as Struble and Jury have stated that HD Radio has reached critical-mass with the automakers.

Because people are generally too stupid to figure out how to work anything more complex than an analog radio? :

It's not just HD radio, it's anything computerized, people just are too overwhelmed to figure these things out. We've had such a great technological leap in the last decade, especially when it comes to in-car electronics, and all the doo-dads are laid out by computer engineers who have no business dawdling in human interface design. Like, why do we have touch screens AT ALL in cars? No haptic feedback means you gotta take your eyes off the road to confirm a button press. That's insane and dangerous.

Believe me, I've ridden in cars where the owner didn't know how to set the radio presets because it was more complex than simply pressing and holding a mechanical button. It involved going into the menu or some mess. That's completely user (and driver) unfriendly.

Anywho, the HD issue is probably due to the difference when the digital drops out and goes back to analog. I know people find the drop to silent on subchannels to be jarring, but if a station doesn't have perfectly synced analog and digital, or the processing is vastly different, that's even more annoying because it's affecting the station that has "always worked fine before", which is a bigger headache than simply finding a new digital station that's not very reliable. It's not necessarily the fault of the radio or the way it's designed, but the end user can't be expected to understand that.

For that matter, even if user were educated, what are the chances they could find anyone at the local radio station to complain to? I posted a link to some audio from WJLQ, below, but that station's HD has been 7 seconds off for YEARS. There simply is no way for a consumer such as myself to tell an engineer "hey someone IS listening, SO FIX IT."

Analog FM sounds better than HD any day. HD can use a higher sampling rate usually 44khz which will give a maximum frequency of around 20-22khz. Analog FM is stuck at 15khz. But there is very little that this extra 5khz brings. HD Radio and other lossy digital audio compression methods sound sharper and clearer, but give off many noticeable artifacts. It probably depends on the music format you like but I notice annoying artifacts accompany percussion instruments like drums and cymbals. This isn't just HD Radio's AAC derived codec, but also MP3 and any other lower bitrate digital audio format.

Depending on the setup, I wholeheartedly disagree. Cumulus runs HD on our local stations but runs no subchannels. And these "single digital" stations sound fantastic. It appears the entire air chain is lossless or run at a sufficient bitrate so as to not cause cascading codec issues, so it all sounds very clean and better than just about any internet stream I have access to. In fact I invite you to listen to the airchecks I posted for WJLQ in Pensacola, which was recorded off the HD feed. They are really clean and clear sounding. There's no mistaking it's digital but it's a far cry from most other HD feeds I've heard, including all the Clear Channel stations in my market, whose HD feeds are wimpy and sound very poor. But then their analog audio is also poor, like a 80 kbps mp3 being played out.

I have full quieting on all the local class C's because I'm so close to them and there is no comparison. The 15 kHz cutoff is obnoxious and annoying compared to a good quality HD feed.

 

[tomservo]

I forgot to add… AM will probably die the slow death it deserves, but FM HD will likely continue on for the foreseeable future. Not so much as a consumer product, where it has failed miserably, but as a method for feeding translators.

That's the only way I see the technology turning a profit for broadcasters.

 

[gosmith123]

Because people are generally too stupid to figure out how to work anything more complex than an analog radio? It's not just HD radio, it's anything computerized, people just are too overwhelmed to figure these things out.

The TSBs address the following:

1. Station Volume changes.
2. Audio repeats or jumps forward in time. An echo occurs when the radio switches between Analog and Digital audio.
3. Digital audio sounds worse than the Analog audio.
4. The HD-Radio sound keeps switching between Digital and Analog audio quality. HD-Radio Indicator keeps turning on and off.
5. Customer can’t tune to a secondary station.
6. No ‘Song Title’ or ‘Artist Information’ is displayed.
7. Station Name is Unintelligible.
8. Station is not received in HD Radio digital sound quality. No HD-Radio stations received at all.
9. My favorite station doesn’t store using the HD-Radio ‘Autostore’ feature.
10. etc.

 

[mmnassour]

I forgot to add… AM will probably die the slow death it deserves, but FM HD will likely continue on for the foreseeable future. Not so much as a consumer product, where it has failed miserably, but as a method for feeding translators.

That's the only way I see the technology turning a profit for broadcasters.

No kidding here....you mean an HD transmitter with all that goes with it, including licensing fees, is a better deal than a simple STL?

 

[spunker88]

Depending on the setup, I wholeheartedly disagree. Cumulus runs HD on our local stations but runs no subchannels. And these "single digital" stations sound fantastic. It appears the entire air chain is lossless or run at a sufficient bitrate so as to not cause cascading codec issues, so it all sounds very clean and better than just about any internet stream I have access to. In fact I invite you to listen to the airchecks I posted for WJLQ in Pensacola, which was recorded off the HD feed. They are really clean and clear sounding. There's no mistaking it's digital but it's a far cry from most other HD feeds I've heard, including all the Clear Channel stations in my market, whose HD feeds are wimpy and sound very poor. But then their analog audio is also poor, like a 80 kbps mp3 being played out.

I have full quieting on all the local class C's because I'm so close to them and there is no comparison. The 15 kHz cutoff is obnoxious and annoying compared to a good quality HD feed.

The aircheck you posted does sound decent as most single HD stations usually sound, I will add that the cutoff frequency for your clip is around 16khz when I ran a Hanning window on it in Audacity. But really anything above 15khz is pointless as most people's hearing drops off at this point.

The general public isn't going to go buy some hard to find HD radio just so they can hear the same signal in a smaller area. The thing is most people don't really care about audio quality that much to notice any difference. Its pointless to add an HD signal that may sound marginally better when it requires equipment upgrades on both ends (broadcaster and receiver). Also the fact that HD covers a much smaller area than the analog FM signal can. I'm talking about the outside 60dbu contour area.

Digital transmission when done right can be more efficient than analog, look at how far cell phones have come. HD Radio though is a flawed method of transmission. I would like to see a non-hybrid digital radio broadcast that is kept within the station's sidebands and uses the same power level as the analog signal. Its hard to compare the two until then.

 

[tomservo]

The TSBs address the following:

1. Station Volume changes.
2. Audio repeats or jumps forward in time. An echo occurs when the radio switches between Analog and Digital audio.
3. Digital audio sounds worse than the Analog audio.
4. The HD-Radio sound keeps switching between Digital and Analog audio quality. HD-Radio Indicator keeps turning on and off.
5. Customer can’t tune to a secondary station.
6. No ‘Song Title’ or ‘Artist Information’ is displayed.
7. Station Name is Unintelligible.
8. Station is not received in HD Radio digital sound quality. No HD-Radio stations received at all.
9. My favorite station doesn’t store using the HD-Radio ‘Autostore’ feature.
10. etc.

Unless there's an antenna issue with the radio itself, it sounds like those are broacasters' problems. Several of my local stations send out faulty PAD data, for example. Now before, people would say "why bother fixing it when no one is listening"… well, obviously people are TRYING to listen but the usual cost cutting at radio stations is keeping things from running ship shape.

No kidding here....you mean an HD transmitter with all that goes with it, including licensing fees, is a better deal than a simple STL?

It is when it allows someone to broadcast a new and unique format that they couldn't relay otherwise. If your station buys a translator, guess what? It can only relay that analogue signal. With HD, it can relay something no one would otherwise hear and create an all new format. Maybe it's pointless for a group that has a full cluster with some deathbed AMs that need to be put to use, but not ever cluster is like that.

The general public isn't going to go buy some hard to find HD radio just so they can hear the same signal in a smaller area. The thing is most people don't really care about audio quality that much to notice any difference. Its pointless to add an HD signal that may sound marginally better when it requires equipment upgrades on both ends (broadcaster and receiver). Also the fact that HD covers a much smaller area than the analog FM signal can. I'm talking about the outside 60dbu contour area.

You could say the same thing about online radio, which only works at a computer on your smartphone, until you go over your data cap and get throttled. It's not the sound quality, it's the extra content that it makes available, something that big radio has by and large failed spectacularly at.

But those that do care about sound quality, what it lacks in analogue smoothness it does make up for with a quiet noise floor, which I can't achieve even with the strongest of local FMs for some reason. Computers, lights, who knows… But HD does help that in my particular setting.

 

[calstymes]

gosmith123 thusly did spake:

iBiquity may attempt a fraudulent IPO, as Struble and Jury have stated that HD Radio has reached critical-mass with the automakers.

It is simply astonishing that iBiquity's chairman has been capable of convincing so many people, both in and out of 'the business', how well his company is doing both financially and in market penetration.

He is one very crafty fellow!

 

[Savage]

I want to hire Bob Struble for advertising sales. I want to sell spots at 3 and 4am, 6am Sundays, EAS tests, pattern changes....oh yes. And I want to sell that time when we're actually off the air for emergency maintenance. I want to sell "naming rights" for the bathroom.

If he can sell HD to Detroit, he can sell ANYTHING.