As if we needed another reason to hate HD radio, I found another one last night. I normally listen to the Yankees radio broadcast while watching on TV since I prefer Sterling over Kay. My stereo tends to pick up a lot of electrical noise on the AM band, so I connected my portable HD radio to a stereo input. The sound quality on WCBS FM HD-3 was great, but the HD FM broadcast of WCBS AM was at least 1-2 minutes behind the 880 AM broadcast. Why would they let this happen? As you can imagine the TV and radio were so far out of synch there was no way to listen to the HD broadcast so I had to go back to AM.
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WCBS FM HD-3
- Thread starter ansky212
- Start date
Yankees on CBS-FM HD3 sound great in stereo. If you're in the Hudson Valley area including WKXP/WZAD's "The Wolf" where they still carrying Yankees baseball, it sounds much the same on FM than CBS-FM's HD3 channel. Same quality and it's in full stereo.
From what I've witnessed since listening to HD radio over the past 4 years, any AM signal that's rebroadcast on an FM HD signal will have its broadcast lag about 1 minute behind the AM signal's transmission. Processing issues, I'd guess? Someone with knowledge of the engineering aspect of the technology could answer better than I. The Fm HD broadcasts could be suspected to be a station's online stream (since those also tend to lag due to buffering) but this is NOT true - the same broadcast & commercials run on the FM HD and AM broadcasts.
Any station (AM/FM) that is running in HD has an inherent built-in 8 second delay. Thus the partial reason why AM stations shut it off during most sports broadcasts so that the broadcast is as close to live action as possible (unless, of course, a station decides to run its own "profanity delay"). The other reason that HD is turned off may be so the AM signal might carry further than it normally would with HD turned on; again, someone with more technical expertise could better answer that question.
Any station (AM/FM) that is running in HD has an inherent built-in 8 second delay. Thus the partial reason why AM stations shut it off during most sports broadcasts so that the broadcast is as close to live action as possible (unless, of course, a station decides to run its own "profanity delay"). The other reason that HD is turned off may be so the AM signal might carry further than it normally would with HD turned on; again, someone with more technical expertise could better answer that question.
The data compression and decompression involved in processing an HD subchannel is substantial, and what you're hearing in the long delays for HD2/HD3 is the delay caused by the rather intense processing work involved in coding and decoding the digital signal.
The 8-second delay on FM-HD1 and AM HD is partially coding/decoding delay, and partially a time-diversity delay designed to prevent dropouts in mobile reception. Imagine you're listening to an AM HD signal and approaching a bridge. At least in theory, even though you may lose the signal as you're passing under the bridge, your radio will continue to play out cached digital data for a second or two, and then catch up by blending to analog as the signal comes back while it recovers the digital signal. (Emphasis here on "in theory.")
The 8-second delay on FM-HD1 and AM HD is partially coding/decoding delay, and partially a time-diversity delay designed to prevent dropouts in mobile reception. Imagine you're listening to an AM HD signal and approaching a bridge. At least in theory, even though you may lose the signal as you're passing under the bridge, your radio will continue to play out cached digital data for a second or two, and then catch up by blending to analog as the signal comes back while it recovers the digital signal. (Emphasis here on "in theory.")
CBS also has an HD-4 (yes, 4!) channel on one of their Philadelphia FM statiosn devoted entirely to the Phillies, and I believe they carry live games, too. Wonder if it's with the same delay as WCBS-AM...
@Disney Fanatic: Didn't 97.3 WZAD recently break away from the "Wolf" simulcast with WKXP? Thought I read that on the ALB/HV board.
@Disney Fanatic: Didn't 97.3 WZAD recently break away from the "Wolf" simulcast with WKXP? Thought I read that on the ALB/HV board.
DToTheJ said:
They have 96Kbps of total streaming data bandwidth that they can divvy up into as many HDx channels as is practical.
If they ran each "channel" at 16Kbps (a moderately tolerable monaural stream) they could have as many as six. However, the HD1 channel is mandated to be the same programming as the analog audio. Some radios do NOT give you the ability to force reception in analog, so it would switch to that 16k stream every time. That "shocking" drop of quality would be highly objectionable to the 20 or 30 listeners that have HD radios. :
Thus, most HD stations will want to run no less than 48Kbps for the HD1. In theory, that would leave them 16Kbps for each, HD2, 3, and 4, which is probably what they are doing.
Scott Fybush said:
Ah! That is something I didn't know.
Very good! I always thought 96Kbps was pretty doggone anemic! When you consider that they squeezed over 50Kbps through a 3Khz phone line with 1990's technology, they SHOULD be able to squeeze over 1.6Mbps thru 100Khz with today's! Reduce that to 50% for 100% redundancy, and you'd have 800Kbps. That's enough for a lossless FLAC stream at TRUE CD quality! There actually is more than 100Khz, I'm just being very conservative.
Here's a nice explanation of an HD signal, along with a spectrum display:
http://www.ham-radio.com/k6sti/hdrsn.htm
So what programming is on WCBS-FM HD2?
oldiesfan6479 said:
ToNY (to New York) which is a Jack clone is on WCBS-FM HD-2. I wish it would be a 1955-1963 oldies station.
Bruce
BruceS8852 said:
Available online here: http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/WCBSHD2AAC.pls (high: 64 kbps 44.1 khz)
and here: http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/WCBSHD2.pls (low: 64 kbps 22 khz)
DToTheJ said:
Not really! WKXP or WZAD will still be simulcasting "The Wolf" and they're still carrying Yankees baseball from WCBS-AM and it is on FM just like WCBS-FM's HD3 channel, and it's in stereo. Along with the games, they run country music as well. I don't see any of these two station breaking away from its "Wolf" simulcast anytime soon.
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