"Dr." Carter may know a thing or two about spending tens of thousands on overpriced hi-fi gear, but he apparently knows nothing about the limitations of FM broadcasting or what little spectrum iBiquity or anyone else has to work with in trying an IBOC digital system.
Here's a two-fer of misinformation:
"It is licensed by the FTC to be broadcast at 1% of the power of the analog signal. In theory it is supposed to be transparent to the listener of the analog signal. However in cars at the limits of range, the digital signal adds a spit, spit artifact to the analog FM sound as you progress."
I'll get the FTC right on the 'spit spit' sound just as soon as they're done prosecuting someone for importing Chinese fraudulent Gucci purses
! ;D
The end summary jives with my observations, and ranks the analog FM as the best sounding, followed by a 128 kbps mp3 internet stream, then HD, then "Sirius XM on DirecTV". He also picked out the lack of a center presence that colors the audio, which I notice when I'm wearing headphones. (Certain sounds that should be directly in the dead center of the mix get digitally squirted all over the left/right spectrum. It's most noticeable on speech.)
He claims the unit doesn't decode subchannels, which I find odd since the pictures on Amazon clearly show it receiving WASH-FM-2. And it's odd that he picks on the twinkling watery high end of the mp3 stream but says nothing about the crispy "8 bit in a 16 bit world" hash unique to the HDC codec, or that the high end is even more artificial and strained on HD than an mp3. And he seems to think the sound being piped in via DirecTV is exactly what one would hear on a Sirius system, when in reality it's DirecTV's MPEG2 audio compression being applied to XM's uncompressed audio fed directly from Washington DC (or it was when the review was written, things may be different now.) I can assure the good doctor that Sirius' PAC sounds even worse than HD or mp3s or DirecTV's feed.
This guy is talking about how bad it sounds on things like a "NAD integrated amp and a pair of D'Appolito Thor transmission line loudspeakers", well duh, those are gonna reveal ALL the bad nuances of the audio, FM included. I find it odd that he finds the brick walled 15 kHz response of FM to be wondrous but finds fault so easily in other transmission methods. Yes, analog FM can be analog from end to end and sound fantastic, but it's not audiophile by any stretch of the imagination. It's one set of audio trade-offs versus another when you compare analog FM and digital anything.
I appreciate the man's desire to have the best audio quality possible in his installations, but in doing so FM, much less HD or satellite radio or anything at all off the internet, should have NO place in that system. Classical music on public radio is one of my "go to" things to show off how bad FM sounds. Quiet passages reveal the ever-present hiss that's behind all but the strongest of signals, and if it isn't hiss it's the quiet "chk-chk-chk" of RDS bleed over, or worse yet, quiet squawking from a SCA channel. Yuck
! I can't even listen to WBHM in Birmingham anymore. No matter where in the ore-laden hills of Birmingham you are, the station has an honest to god whistle that just never completely goes away. (Yet in the late 90's they turned off the RDS because it was "too noisy".)
In summary, his review is comparing the absolute highest end FM reception equipment to HD, which HD can't help but fall short of (hell it falls so short of a lot of things right now). But who listens to FM on a multi-thousand dollar receiver, on multi-thousand dollar speakers, with an outdoor yagi on top notch 75 ohm coax? Very few. And yes, HD is a step DOWN for those people, unfortunately. But those people are living in a world of one, anyway. The vast majority of FM multicasting is loud, thumping popular music, screaming DJs, obnoxious car commercials and the like. The faults of HD are more or less masked by that sort of content. (And are all but transparent on a really well encoded system with no subchannels.)
