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HD Radio

Plate Blocker said:
HD is a great idea that tripped over the dollar signs. Its the best kept secret in the radio business; like a previous poster said, there are many people who have it that don't even know it.

Ibiquity and now Xperia seem only interested in the license fees and equipment royalties. After many years there is no advertising done, nothing that educates Joe and Mary Sixpack what their radio can do, info about sub channel use, nothing.

I know a small market fleet owner that won't consider it....considers it 'big city' stuff. Of course, he thought RDS was too high-fallootin' when it came out.

HD is another good idea like FMX noise reduction that focused too hard on making money for the proponents than getting the product out there.
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What should have been done was to put HD on a separate band as was done in Europe. Then you could've had reasonable bitrates and multichannel broadcasting. But digital radio hasn't exactly been a great success there, either. Possibly that's because that would require buying a new radio, and most people do that these days only indirectly through the purchase of a vehicle.

Any improvement over analog FM is incremental, except for the resistance to multipath, which is a real improvement. Otherwise, the digital artifacts drive some people crazy, and the whole scheme seemed to be a solution looking for a problem. It did solve one thing: providing a means to feed translators with an alternate format to what's on the main channel. But many translators have less than stellar market coverage - Denver is a prime example, even with a nice tall mountain overlooking the city - and so, at best, such translators are just kind of there.
 
A friend of mine has a really nice car with a high-end Advanced audio system.But he only listens to talk radio, so none of this matters to him.but if you like music, particularly music like jazz or classical or alt rock,There's just no question that it sounds better in HD
 
vchimpanzee said:
They do work, but you can't hear them as well. HD is gone when it's not perfect, and you hear the main channel instead.
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Right.And that is when you can really tell the difference.when I'm out in the Fringe area of my classical station and it pops back and forth between standard and HD the difference is just unmistakable.
 
BruceB said:
Right.And that is when you can really tell the difference.when I'm out in the Fringe area of my classical station and it pops back and forth between standard and HD the difference is just unmistakable.
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Is a classical station engineered to sound better in general?
 
CTListener said:
Given the high percentage of audiophiles among fans of classical music, I'd imagine that's a must. Jazz also appeals to audiophiles.
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The classical station I referred to is only HD 1.There are no sideband channels.Does that mean they're using the whole frequency for that 1 station or does it not work that way in the case of HD?
 
BruceB said:
The classical station I referred to is only HD 1.There are no sideband channels.Does that mean they're using the whole frequency for that 1 station or does it not work that way in the case of HD?
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It’s probably more the way the audio is processed to not sound overly compressed.
 
Mark Roberts said:
What should have been done was to put HD on a separate band as was done in Europe.
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Uh, that worked where radio was substantially controlled by the government with strong and much listened-to OTA services in England, France, Germany, Italy and many others.

Canada tried it in an environment more like the US. It failed.
 
BruceB said:
The classical station I referred to is only HD 1.There are no sideband channels.Does that mean they're using the whole frequency for that 1 station or does it not work that way in the case of HD?
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Yes, the channels are subdivided and if there is only one, it gets the total available "space".
 
Plate Blocker said:
HD is a great idea that tripped over the dollar signs. Its the best kept secret in the radio business; like a previous poster said, there are many people who have it that don't even know it.

Ibiquity and now Xperia seem only interested in the license fees and equipment royalties. After many years there is no advertising done, nothing that educates Joe and Mary Sixpack what their radio can do, info about sub channel use, nothing.

I know a small market fleet owner that won't consider it....considers it 'big city' stuff. Of course, he thought RDS was too high-fallootin' when it came out.

HD is another good idea like FMX noise reduction that focused too hard on making money for the proponents than getting the product out there.
Click to expand...
Exactly. "Just build it and they will come" was a terrific, workable idea in a fantasy based, fiction baseball movie in the 1990s, but it really isn't working with Radio these days, including HD. For example, I question just how many LGBTQ people in my metro are even aware of the two HD2 channels here in the Seattle market that cater to those demos.

fybush said:
Which says a lot more about that owner than it does about HD or Xperi.
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It might also indicate a failure on the part of Radio, and HD Radio, to promote and educate business people about whatever benefits HD can provide.
 
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Mark Roberts said:
What should have been done was to put HD on a separate band as was done in Europe. Then you could've had reasonable bitrates and multichannel broadcasting. But digital radio hasn't exactly been a great success there, either. Possibly that's because that would require buying a new radio, and most people do that these days only indirectly through the purchase of a vehicle.

Any improvement over analog FM is incremental, except for the resistance to multipath, which is a real improvement. Otherwise, the digital artifacts drive some people crazy, and the whole scheme seemed to be a solution looking for a problem. It did solve one thing: providing a means to feed translators with an alternate format to what's on the main channel. But many translators have less than stellar market coverage - Denver is a prime example, even with a nice tall mountain overlooking the city - and so, at best, such translators are just kind of there.
Click to expand...
DAB has had varying successes in Europe, mainly in Norway and a couple other countries.

The issue with having DAB here was that there are so many stations in the US, and a DAB system has a limited number of channels available to cover an area (similar to SiriusXM). In Norway, the government network radio channels (NRK) are all covered in the DAB networks, and there is a sort of lottery by the commercial FMs in the major metros to be included on the DAB networks, generally based on their ratings (I think). The other remaining commercial FMs are OTA radio, just as we have here.

With the HD system like we have in the US, any station that wanted to, could have a digital signal.
 
Having rented several cars in different cities this year all of the controls are different and some are difficult. The last Hyundai I rented last week (2023 model), it was not obvious but Blue Toothing my phone was easy.
IMHO HD is a joke 40 miles from town if you are in class B territory east of the Mississippi.

The FCC could have increased their fee collections during the TV repack. Using off the shelf technology, they could have 5k "digital" channels in the analog channel 2 to 4 space. The analog signals would have tone to find the digital channel. The digital radio would have analog "virtual" frequency display allowing work around for TV stations that for some reason wanted the crappy frequency. Antenna height and power would be based on analog class. Class A FM , class D and C AM get 300 feet, class B AM and FM get 500 feet. Class C FMs get their class height, Class A AMs get the highest FM C height in the market or 500 ft in class B areas. Of course the existing analog facilities would have to be kept up too. It will never happen now but there was a opportunity.
 
boombox4 said:
DAB has had varying successes in Europe, mainly in Norway and a couple other countries.

The issue with having DAB here was that there are so many stations in the US, and a DAB system has a limited number of channels available to cover an area (similar to SiriusXM). In Norway, the government network radio channels (NRK) are all covered in the DAB networks, and there is a sort of lottery by the commercial FMs in the major metros to be included on the DAB networks, generally based on their ratings (I think). The other remaining commercial FMs are OTA radio, just as we have here.
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You can simply add additional DAB transmitters on adjacent channels. Each can have a bunch of additional stations.

Again, as I said, DAB has "worked" where the government controls a significant portion of listening with state radio stations.
 
DavidEduardo said:
Uh, that worked where radio was substantially controlled by the government with strong and much listened-to OTA services in England, France, Germany, Italy and many others.

Canada tried it in an environment more like the US. It failed.
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I think a reasonable alternate explanation is that having all stations in a locality on the same transmitter site is a necessary condition for digital broadcasting to succeed. This comes about through regulation in some European countries; in the U.S. it's something that could be done by agreement with various stations. This has been done with various master sites for FM already - St. Louis, Houston, Albuquerque. Incumbent broadcasters with good coverage may not want to share with rimshot stations that would gain equivalent coverage through the use of a common site. So either some incentives or some coercion might be necessary. Is this likely in the current regulatory and business environment in the United States? Probably not. But a substantial part of the world is moving to a different system from HD; and HD is a technological dead-end. In a few years, desperation to survive may open some minds that today are closed.
 
secondchoice said:
Having rented several cars in different cities this year all of the controls are different and some are difficult. The last Hyundai I rented last week (2023 model), it was not obvious but Blue Toothing my phone was easy.
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The dash is about the only thing I like about the Tesla. It resembles your phone and has a basically flat learning curve. Seems like the other manufacturers have their own systems that expect you to adapt to them. For someone like me who works in IT, it's not that big of a deal, but that's not your average driver.

Mark Roberts said:
This has been done with various master sites for FM already - St. Louis, Houston, Albuquerque. Incumbent broadcasters with good coverage may not want to share with rimshot stations that would gain equivalent coverage through the use of a common site. So either some incentives or some coercion might be necessary. Is this likely in the current regulatory and business environment in the United States?
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A World War II era law or regulation requires a tower owner to allow anyone who wants a spot on their tower to have one if it can support it. There was a push a few years ago to get rid of that requirement, but I don't know what happened with that. I remember 15-20 years ago when KRBK-TV in Osage Beach, MO registered for a license using the KJEL 103.7 tower site. I was told KJEL's ownership at the time wasn't happy about it, but there was nothing it could do.

Mark Roberts said:
Probably not. But a substantial part of the world is moving to a different system from HD; and HD is a technological dead-end. In a few years, desperation to survive may open some minds that today are closed.
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I'm not sure that the technology itself is a dead-end, but the customers have spoken. The average consumer won't buy a standalone radio. Radio's reach is tied to its ubiquity, and HD Radio's business model is the opposite. HD Radio will need to embrace the same model of piggybacking onto other devices, but, with it wanting licensing fees from those who use it, that doesn't seem likely to happen.
 
Kent said:
I'm not sure that the technology itself is a dead-end, but the customers have spoken. The average consumer won't buy a standalone radio.
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This often is said, and I don't deny it - yet Sangean continues to thrive, Sony still sells radios, and China's pumping 'em out like nobody's business. So where are all these units going if nobody's buying them? "Hobbyists" isn't a sufficient answer because that's not such a big market on its own.
 
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