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Is a Translator in KBME 790AM's Future?

T

The Rimshot

With the Astros' best record in baseball and growing popularity in the Houston area, and with the abundance in Houston area translators, do the members of radiodiscussions.com believe that KBME will capitalize on their growing ratings and purchase a translator to make up for nighttime coverage shortcomings?

If you look at the nighttime coverage map, KBME does not need any signal help to the south, as all the power gets dumped into the Gulf after dusk. However, KBME barely makes it to Rosenberg, and one could argue that as close to Houston as Sugar Land, the signal could be improved. There is a Richmond-Rosenberg translator, 100.7FM. Does KBME snatch that one up to improve its nighttime coverage to the West and Southwest portions of Houston?
 
Translators don't make nearly as much sense for the big companies, simply because the big companies would have to operate them legally.

Any translator that is co-channel with Beaumont or Corpus Christi stations would get absolutely destroyed during tropo season if operated with licensed parameters.

Their coverage wouldn't come close to what we're seeing out of most of the translators that have been moved into Houston.

I guess the question would be does iHeart want a sometimes radio station? Do you want regular listener complaints from people wondering why their sports station is playing country most mornings in the spring and fall?
 
BamaTX said:
I know of nobody that owns an HD radio.
Click to expand...

You're probably right when it comes to home use. All I have at home now is a GE super radio, but we have two cars that came with both Sirius and HD radio. The HD is still used when available.
 
2Speakers said:
You must not know a lot of people who own cars.
Click to expand...

Your statement would be true if all cars had HD radio off the factory line, but you know that's not the case. Up until last year's model, HD radio was only an upgrade option on the F-150. It wasn't even standard on the Lariat luxury package, which already had a pretty damn good head unit with all the bells and whistles.

Don't know many people who care to pay extra to get HD radio when the standard unit comes with Bluetooth and satellite radio now days (which is all millennials really need). Most people don't even bother asking for it and aren't running out to replace or adapt their current head units with HD Radio.

HD radio is a gimmick whose purpose is not very well defined. For a technology known to the public as "HD Radio", the sound quality is very terrible (spare me the 'Hybrid Digital' meaning...That's not how it's being advertised). KBME sounds a lot better streaming at 48 kbps/44.1 khz AAC than it does over KQBT-HD2. It's only meaningful use has been to make translators into independent stations.
 
BamaTX said:
(spare me the 'Hybrid Digital' meaning...
Click to expand...

It never meant "Hybrid Digital".

The name was adopted to sound like "HDTV" but for radio. The intent was to "be digital" when radio thought that being analog was a major disadvantage.
 
BamaTX said:
Your statement would be true if all cars had HD radio off the factory line, but you know that's not the case. Up until last year's model, HD radio was only an upgrade option on the F-150. It wasn't even standard on the Lariat luxury package, which already had a pretty damn good head unit with all the bells and whistles.

Don't know many people who care to pay extra to get HD radio when the standard unit comes with Bluetooth and satellite radio now days (which is all millennials really need). Most people don't even bother asking for it and aren't running out to replace or adapt their current head units with HD Radio.

HD radio is a gimmick whose purpose is not very well defined. For a technology known to the public as "HD Radio", the sound quality is very terrible (spare me the 'Hybrid Digital' meaning...That's not how it's being advertised). KBME sounds a lot better streaming at 48 kbps/44.1 khz AAC than it does over KQBT-HD2. It's only meaningful use has been to make translators into independent stations.
Click to expand...

My neighbor's Ford Fusion has one.

About 16% of vehicles in Houston are HD Radio equipped.
 
BamaTX said:
For a technology known to the public as "HD Radio", the sound quality is very terrible
Click to expand...

The audio quality of HD Radio is far superior to SiriusXM, and most people probably can't tell the difference between the HD and analog FM quality. Most listeners are not audiophiles. That being said, I enjoy satellite radio despite the audio limitations. The sound is "good enough" and it provides me musical genres and other programming not available on standard FM.

A lot of cars have HD Radio. Lots of people have no idea how to use it or that it even exists, which is a marketing failure.

KILT 610 has promoted their HD simulcast on 100.3 HD-2 quite a bit in the past.
 
Mediafrog+ said:
A lot of cars have HD Radio. Lots of people have no idea how to use it or that it even exists, which is a marketing failure.
Click to expand...

I get your point, but when it comes to tuning an HD radio, you don't have to "know how to use it." You turn the tuning knob up-or-down from the primary station and up comes HD-2 or HD-3, so plenty of uninformed folks can stumble upon the Astros broadcast and punch a save button. Further to your point that HD is a "marketing failure," true but so was FM radio in its infancy -not sayin' there's a hope for HD, we'll see. If 2Speakers is right that 16% of Houston vehicles have an HD radio, that would be a big positive, and likely to grow somewhat. And, I agree that HD radio is far superior to satellite radio where the signal compression is intense so that all those stations will fit into one pipeline satellite feed, weakening bass/treble extremes, but the music variety is hard to beat.
 
2Speakers said:
My neighbor's Ford Fusion has one.

About 16% of vehicles in Houston are HD Radio equipped.
Click to expand...

First you say I must not know someone with a car, but then you throw such a low number. I don't know where you got it, but it sounds about right tbh.

At 16%, you're looking at roughly 3 out of every 20 cars in Houston that are equipped with HD Radio. That's a damn low number. Hell, there are probably as many cars with expired tags in this city as there are cars equipped with HD Radio (or maybe even more). The only formats that are available are niche or dying formats that aren't pushing the demand for such technology. Whatever cool and unique format you find in an HD subchannel, a millennial can find 10 streams just like it or go full On-Demand via Apple Music or Spotify.
 
BamaTX said:
First you say I must not know someone with a car, but then you throw such a low number. I don't know where you got it, but it sounds about right tbh.

At 16%, you're looking at roughly 3 out of every 20 cars in Houston that are equipped with HD Radio. That's a damn low number. Hell, there are probably as many cars with expired tags in this city as there are cars equipped with HD Radio (or maybe even more). The only formats that are available are niche or dying formats that aren't pushing the demand for such technology. Whatever cool and unique format you find in an HD subchannel, a millennial can find 10 streams just like it or go full On-Demand via Apple Music or Spotify.
Click to expand...

The number was 10% at this time last year. Do the math. That's huge year to year growth, and it will continue.
 
More and more cars are coming with HD radio as standard equipment. This is happening even as car manufacturers are dropping AM radios from vehicles.
 
2Speakers said:
The number was 10% at this time last year. Do the math. That's huge year to year growth, and it will continue.
Click to expand...
So you went from 1 out of every 10 cars to 3 out of every 20?

Considering HD first launched in 2006 in this market, that's slow. In that time frame, Bluetooth usage has skyrocketed and has allowed the use of on demand services such as Apple music and Spotify. There's a reason why you now have more advertisement for the iHeartRadio app than you do for HD Radio on iHeart radio stations.
 
BamaTX said:
So you went from 1 out of every 10 cars to 3 out of every 20?

Considering HD first launched in 2006 in this market, that's slow. In that time frame, Bluetooth usage has skyrocketed and has allowed the use of on demand services such as Apple music and Spotify. There's a reason why you now have more advertisement for the iHeartRadio app than you do for HD Radio on iHeart radio stations.
Click to expand...

I have to ask.

If radio is so irrelevant, then why are you spending so much time in a radio forum?

Anyone with even half a brain can see this isn't an issue with consumers. Radio reaches over 240 million Americans each week. Do people want streaming services? It's hard to tell. My family streamed one of the Apple produced Christmas channels while putting up our tree this year, and it was horrid. It was a tight rotation of songs, and when I say tight, I heard the exact same song from the same artist twice in an hour. They're putting it out there, but clearly aren't investing the time and effort to get the product even remotely right.

Pandora has never turned a profit.

Spotify's losses this year are projected to double.

If EVERYONE is listening to them, then why can't they make ANY money?

Give me a break.

HD Radio's growth, or lack of it up until the last few years, were the result of mismanagement by the company behind the technology. They actually expected manufacturers to pay them to include the feature. I suspect they've become much more reasonable about this, and it's why HD integration is accelerating at the automakers.

HD Radio could have been in every car by now, if radio as an industry had followed the satellite radio model and paid off the automakers for inclusion, but they didn't, so we're at 16% in 2017 and will probably be around 23% in 2018 as older cars slowly get replaced.

For consumers, HD Radio isn't HD Radio. It's just radio. They get in their car, and when they hit the tune up button, their radio lands on static-free version of KBME, if they're listening to 93.7's main channel, then they probably wonder why they can't do this when driving their wife's older car. I've explained it to several friends now, in pretty much those terms. They wonder why one of their cars has it and the other doesn't, and they're typically sports radio listeners tuning into the HD simulcasts of KBME and KILT.
 
I've never claimed radio was irrelevant. I've said it's slowly headed to irrelevancy, but it'll be years before it gets to that point. As of today, it still serves a purpose in emergency situations and it's low power consumption makes it a great alternative to over-the-top media.

What will always be irrelevant is HD Radio. It just never took off and will probably go the same way AM Stereo did. How many AM stations are left that still broadcast IBOC digital radio? It seems like almost half of the FM HD subchannels in this market are used to feed translators. And those subchannels that do have a neat or unique format have no fallback in spotty areas. Ever tried HD Radio in Conroe? And forget about HD Radio in rimshot stations, they have more dropouts than inner city high schools.

Then there is the issue with some broadcasters completely neglecting or having issues with IBOC digital radio. I remember a few stations always had issues with their audio not being properly delayed so anytime you hit an area with constant dropouts, well...it was annoying. Then there were a few stations who had better audio quality over analog than they did over HD (*cough* *cough* Radio One...Is that still the case? Or have they fixed that issue?)

HD Radio is just a very unreliable medium that never took off in an already competitive market. You said it yourself; many of these media companies are struggling to turn a profit, so how is potentially spreading listeners even more throughout HD subchannels helpful? It's destined to fail. I wouldn't be surprised if this technology is dropped by broadcasters in the next 10 years or subchannels that don't feed translators go away.
 
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