After being silent for nearly five months, WYAY-HD2 now has audio again. The Eagle 106.7 brand has returned to the airwaves on this multicast channel, with its familiar playlist and imaging, minus the talent and advertising.
Now I shall hop on my soapbox for just a minute. First, the audio quality is quite sub-par. The bitrate being used isn't adequate for music - the artifacts are overly annoying. It sounds like some kind of processing is in place, but it's not very good at maintaining consistency, and the equalization is off. It sounds like I'm listening to a cheap boombox while I'm actually listening to quite a decent system in my truck. You don't have to limit and clip it to death like most of the rest of the dial, but we expect some kind of consistency and decent equalization curve. On the programming side, the imaging needs to be reviewed - many of the sweepers/liners are no longer applicable (references to the website, etc.) I'm not sure how the playlist is being created, but I heard Randy Travis' "On the Other Hand" three times in the short time frame I listened last night.
While it's nice to hear this format without commercials, how viable of a format is this for their HD2? A listener can pick up the majority of this same playlist by tuning to one of the other two country outlets in town - the only advantage to listening to the HD2 would be no commercials. I guess it's a nice gesture to try to reach out to those "abandoned" listeners, but I don't think it will motivate those listeners to buy an HD Radio to hear the brand nor advertisers to pay for it. I think we've more than proven at this point that you have to put more effort into your HD2 programming than a playlist and imaging that are produced but never maintained. It will definitely be interesting to see what multicast channels pop up when the PPM data starts up here in a couple of months.
Now I shall hop on my soapbox for just a minute. First, the audio quality is quite sub-par. The bitrate being used isn't adequate for music - the artifacts are overly annoying. It sounds like some kind of processing is in place, but it's not very good at maintaining consistency, and the equalization is off. It sounds like I'm listening to a cheap boombox while I'm actually listening to quite a decent system in my truck. You don't have to limit and clip it to death like most of the rest of the dial, but we expect some kind of consistency and decent equalization curve. On the programming side, the imaging needs to be reviewed - many of the sweepers/liners are no longer applicable (references to the website, etc.) I'm not sure how the playlist is being created, but I heard Randy Travis' "On the Other Hand" three times in the short time frame I listened last night.
While it's nice to hear this format without commercials, how viable of a format is this for their HD2? A listener can pick up the majority of this same playlist by tuning to one of the other two country outlets in town - the only advantage to listening to the HD2 would be no commercials. I guess it's a nice gesture to try to reach out to those "abandoned" listeners, but I don't think it will motivate those listeners to buy an HD Radio to hear the brand nor advertisers to pay for it. I think we've more than proven at this point that you have to put more effort into your HD2 programming than a playlist and imaging that are produced but never maintained. It will definitely be interesting to see what multicast channels pop up when the PPM data starts up here in a couple of months.
