Well really there is no contest in my mind, that HDFM sounds a LOT better than XM. I read in the XM boards that XM was giving out 10 free channels for 10 days or something like that. I pulled out my old skyfi 1 radio hooked it on and wow, the quality was poor. Not very clear. I just wish HDFM was easer to DX!
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Sound quality XM Radio Vs. HDFM
- Thread starter jras20
- Start date
Assuming the digital FM station is only running one or two additional streams of programming, the "HD" signal without question sounds (and is, upon analyzing frequencies) better than even the best ones on XM Satellite Radio.
Unfortunately for iBiquity supporters, it's meaningless as long as both the quality and quantity of program offerings at XM blow away everything on even the biggest markets' "HD" channels combined. Obviously I'm not alone in having this opinion; consumers have voted with their dollars rather clearly.
As long as the programming is audible, the average consumers cannot (and don't care to) tell the difference between the two sets of audio. I think XM's audio is downright terrible. But I enjoy the programming. If HD-R stations offer equal or better programming, AND can boast superior sound quality, minus docking my checking account thirteen bucks a month, I'm in.
I'm not holding my breath.
Unfortunately for iBiquity supporters, it's meaningless as long as both the quality and quantity of program offerings at XM blow away everything on even the biggest markets' "HD" channels combined. Obviously I'm not alone in having this opinion; consumers have voted with their dollars rather clearly.
As long as the programming is audible, the average consumers cannot (and don't care to) tell the difference between the two sets of audio. I think XM's audio is downright terrible. But I enjoy the programming. If HD-R stations offer equal or better programming, AND can boast superior sound quality, minus docking my checking account thirteen bucks a month, I'm in.
I'm not holding my breath.
M
Mike Walker
Guest
XM's audio is terrible. HD Radio's audio is terrible. XM's audio is great. HD Radio's audio is great. All of the above are true, depending upon the channel/station!
Some XM "channels" have high bitrates, and sound damn good. XM Public Radio sounds great (check out "A Prarie Home Companion" on Saturday nights). Soul Stree, on the other hand, frequently sounds horrid, and talk channels are sometimes worse still.
I have HD FM stations within earshot that sound wonderful, just fine, and God-AWFUL! All things being equal, HD FM has an advantage. But "all things" are almost never equal!
Some XM "channels" have high bitrates, and sound damn good. XM Public Radio sounds great (check out "A Prarie Home Companion" on Saturday nights). Soul Stree, on the other hand, frequently sounds horrid, and talk channels are sometimes worse still.
I have HD FM stations within earshot that sound wonderful, just fine, and God-AWFUL! All things being equal, HD FM has an advantage. But "all things" are almost never equal!
The answer is coding and bit rate. XM radio over the air sounds horrible compared with the audio I get from my I-Pod. The best XM audio is 64 kbps as opposed to the 128 Kbps AAC variation (MP4) that Apple uses. My wife put it pefectly. She said the I-Pod audio sounded fuller. The XM music channels sound harsh and most of the channels produce digital artifacts on the spoken word. Some are almost unlistenable. I have an Aux input on my car stereo system so I don't have to input the I-pod through a FM convertor and the device I use (A Belkin Part # F8V7058-APL-BLK ) will power your device while getting the audio from your I-Pod by means of the connector on the bottom of the unit, as opposed to via the headphone jack. Because the I-Pod is constantly being removed and reconnected to my car system , I have put together a stereo mini plug to stereo mini jack. That way I am not putting wear and tear on the jack associated with the radio. I'd rather replace the jack on my little patch cord than have to dig inside my cars dashboard to replace its aux input jack. All that aside, the comment that people have voted with their pocketbooks choosing satellite radio over I-Pods and the like is way off and at best hopeful. If XM or Sirius were that successful, they wouldn't be looking towards a merger. The I-Pod is a much more successful device than satellite radio. Also, I can receive some of the XM channels via directv and also noted that the audio was much better than what I have heard over the air. I can only imagine that they are using a T1 from DC to the Directv plant as opposed to picking up their XM channels over the air. It is my opinion that the audio quality of XM is so poor over the air that, that alone would be enough not to subscribe. HD's audio on FM is far superior to XM's best audio and even HD AM sounds better than most of the XM channels, from a technical standpoint.
George Brusstar said:
Before you declare satellite radio the winner here, even though HD radio sales are somewhere between sluggish and non-existent, a few facts:
--Growth in satellite radio subscriptions has already peaked and leveled off. With predictions for the holiday season of slow sales, don't look for a spike in subscriptions over the next month. The bombardment of my e-mailbox by heavily discounted offers from XM (yes, I'm a subscriber) for extra receivers, after several years of not getting any e-mail from them at all, is a sign that they're getting desperate.
--The weekly cume audience for satellite radio is still dwarfed by the weekly cume for ONE New York City radio station (WINS), which is IIRC in excess of 21 million.
--The total weekly cume audience for the two top-rated satellite channels (Sirius' Howard Stern 100 and XM's Top 20 on 20) is 0.91...not quite 2.3 million listeners. The total weekly cume for the two satellite services (all channels included) is 6.73...just shy of 17 million listeners. These are TINY audiences for national services. Paul Harvey on a bad day does better than that on just one of his broadcasts.
--50 of the channels on the two services are reported by Arbitron to have no measurable AQH audience, although in fairness many of those are the traffic-and-weather channels on XM that are of regional interest only.
No one on this board is going to mistake me for an HD radio fan, but fair is fair.
A co-worker of mine has a GM vehicle that is XM-equipped and i get to listen to it when we work together. I've noticed that there's a "gritty" sound similar to poorly encoded mp3 files. I'm sure they're trying to squeeze more channels on the bird by screwing with the bitrate. Personally I would never buy XM for my own personal enjoyment. If I'm going to be subjected to gritty mp3-like sound I'll roll my own and listen with some sort of mp3 player of my choosing.
I haven't given HD radio a real good listen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it sounded similar. Consider the fact that most radio groups process their HD channel as agressively as their main analog channel. With that in mind, why would I plunk out big buck$ to get an HD radio? Same overly processed crap with a slightly better audio bandwidth.
And don't get me started with audio quality on HD2 and beyond ...
I haven't given HD radio a real good listen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it sounded similar. Consider the fact that most radio groups process their HD channel as agressively as their main analog channel. With that in mind, why would I plunk out big buck$ to get an HD radio? Same overly processed crap with a slightly better audio bandwidth.
And don't get me started with audio quality on HD2 and beyond ...
R
Radioman100
Guest
Bill DeFelice said:
Well, it would be good that you don't get started because the quality on HD2 channels can actually be very good, and as you say, you haven't given it "a real good listen!" Most critics here haven't.
My own favorite setup are the stations that do 48/48 for the HD1/HD2. It absolutely spanks anything I've heard on XM in terms of audio quality. Compression artifacts are there, but they're very minimal. I'd liken the sound to a 128k CBR MP3, which most non-audiophiles consider to be perfectly acceptable.
I had XM for a while a few years back. At the time, I was spending a lot of time on the road traveling through areas with little or no radio. The audio quality of pretty much everything I listened to was horrible. I listened to the 80s channel mostly and it was very bad. No highs and lots of compression artifacts. The talk and comedy channels were similarly bad, but the artifacts were more noticeable by far on the talk channels. I have no idea what bitrate they were using, but since the codec is similar to the HDC, it had to be a lot lower than HD Radio at 32k. It sounded far worse.
XM is just trying to squeeze way too many channels into their allotted bandwidth. The quality suffers predictably.
Radioman100 said:
I've taken a listen to a handful of HD2 channels and I've heard a couple that sound very good for the allocated bandwidth - then again, I've heard examples of grit and digital artifacts (of course, it was hard to tell if it was the encoding of the audio source material or the transmission encoding). I've found the 128k mp3 bitrate simply awful and anywhere where I have to encode in mp3 for compatibility I'll always opt for 320k or at the least 256k. It's hard to imagine that broadcasters would use low bitrate encoded audio for playback on their stations - I know several stations that use 96K mono for voicetracks and it's horrible on local playback, let alone after going through their processing chain!
Radioman100 said:
Simply put, I think you hit the nail right on the head!
A
And Awaayy We Go!!
Guest
XM's audio quality seems to vary from channel to channel. The traffic channels are simply awful, but the top music channels (80s on 8, 60s on 6, 20 on 20, etc) sound superb, better than anything I've ever heard on HD2. I think it just depends on how much bandwidth they allocate to the channel in question.
What everyone has said about XM's audio quality is true (Sirius too). It does vary from channel to channel, and it does "take some getting used to." That is the beauty of the human ear and your brain. After a few minutes of listening, your brain will adjust and most people think it sounds just fine.
The problem is that it also causes listener fatigue. After all, making sense of all this is a lot of work for your brain. You will probably find yourself tuning out more often than you might do with a high quality analog signal, or at least you'll find yourself changing channels more frequently. Of course, that lowers TSL (Time Spent Listening). That's not good from the broadcaster's point of view, but seemingly it is a trade off you must accept if you want more channels in a limited amount of bandwidth. That effect also happens to HD signals when more channels are used. There is no free lunch.
Next...
The problem is that it also causes listener fatigue. After all, making sense of all this is a lot of work for your brain. You will probably find yourself tuning out more often than you might do with a high quality analog signal, or at least you'll find yourself changing channels more frequently. Of course, that lowers TSL (Time Spent Listening). That's not good from the broadcaster's point of view, but seemingly it is a trade off you must accept if you want more channels in a limited amount of bandwidth. That effect also happens to HD signals when more channels are used. There is no free lunch.
Next...
cyberdad said:
OK, but the only reason I listen to XM is because I travel a lot. I can usually find decent content on XM that I can't always find while tuning terrestrial radio. AOL in my car is a possibility, but still not all that easy to do.
Yes, I can get wireless Internet in my car, but most people won't go to the trouble to do it, at least, not yet. Like HD, once it becomes integrated into a device that looks and feels like a radio mounted in your dash, then a lot of people will listen. That time will come, but it is not here yet.
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
jras20 said:
I had the opposite experience. HD-FM sounds worse, to me, than MP3 audio. Satellite sounds great in the rental cars when I get it - I had some classical channels and the noise floor was inaudible - fidelity incredible. Tried that with our local classical and I could hear a lot of compression artifacts. I'd rather listen to their analog audio - it doesn't have compression artifacts.
If those folks that run satellite ever get smart and drop the monthly fees in favor of advertisers, they will kick HD radios right out of the running because of the impressive number of channels and variety of programming. Especially if they get the merger and eliminate duplication. Over 300 channels can cover a lot of niches - HD cannot ever reach that number of selections in any market.
The financial model where sat-radio's sole revenue stream comes from subscribers just doesn't work. At some point XM & Sirius - merged or not - will have to come up with a business model that promises some vague hope of ROI as opposed to endlessly stacking up debt.
I would argue that the only realistic way to do that is to sell spots. I'd bet that sat-radio will eventually follow the lead of cable TV, existing side-by-side with terrestrial radio, and selling commercials just like your local cable outfit does.
I would argue that the only realistic way to do that is to sell spots. I'd bet that sat-radio will eventually follow the lead of cable TV, existing side-by-side with terrestrial radio, and selling commercials just like your local cable outfit does.
M
Mike Walker
Guest
The HDC codec used by HD Radio is (reportedly) nearly identical to the aac+ used by XM. So given identical source material, and identical pre-processing, at the same bitrate, it should sound the same. But bitrates are often quite a bit higher on HD FM, hence the better sound...usually (VERY broad statement, I know). XMPR (XM Public Radio) has VERY high quality sound on XM, certainly comparable to anything I've herd on HD FM...better than most. "Soul Street" on XM is simply horrid. Talk programming on XM varies from quite nice, to horrible. Ditto multicast streams on HD. And so it goes.
An interesting development for XM...Magnum Dynalab, the high-end tuner manufacturer, has introduced a high-end XM tuner that uses VACUUM TUBES!
An interesting development for XM...Magnum Dynalab, the high-end tuner manufacturer, has introduced a high-end XM tuner that uses VACUUM TUBES!
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
Mike Walker said:An interesting development for XM...Magnum Dynalab, the high-end tuner manufacturer, has introduced a high-end XM tuner that uses VACUUM TUBES!
Now all we need is an all tube HD radio ----
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LinoNYC
Guest
rbrucecarter5 said:Mike Walker said:An interesting development for XM...Magnum Dynalab, the high-end tuner manufacturer, has introduced a high-end XM tuner that uses VACUUM TUBES!
Now all we need is an all tube HD radio ----
-And about three seven foot racks to house it. Complete w/three phase company switch. Big seller!
Lino
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Radioman100
Guest
rbrucecarter5 said:
I've long wondered why they haven't done this, at least making a few advertiser supported channels available without a subscription.
I don't think we'll ever see the satcasters dump their subscription model though in favor of commercials. Think of the class action lawsuits from people that bought the hardware specifically to receive commercial free radio.
That prospect would make any ambulance chaser salivate.
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