That’s interesting to know. By the way, why is WDLT the only station on HD? Do you think the rest of the Cumulus stations will go HD or at least give an audience the title of the artist and song via RDS? It’s a neat tool to have when your “jam” comes on and your awkwardly trying to find the name of that song or artist. Maybe it’s just me....
I assume you mean why is WDLT the only
Cumulus station in HD… Since most iHeart stations and WUWF are all in HD too.
I figure Cumulus' lack of digital prowess is due to money. They had HD on 92.9, 100.7 and 104.1 a long time ago and one by one they fell by the wayside, leaving WDLT as their lone HD property. Which is kind of weird, since WDLT's HD doesn't actually work correctly and won't decode on the majority of radios I have tried. So far out of probably half a dozen different radios, both portable and in-car, only two seem to actually decode the digital signal. One is my
really old Insignia portable and a VW HD radio I fiddled with over at Pete Moore VW in Pensacola several years ago. My newer Insignias just flash the HD logo constantly; the Ford and Mazda HD radios I've seen just show the HD logo but never blend over to the digital signal. If you can get WDLT's HD to work, I would love to know what kind of radio you have. It seems to be a software-related bug in WDLT's encoder but I don't think their engineer here knows enough about it to get it fixed properly, and I don't know how this stuff works well enough to point him in the right direction.
And… last time I pulled that old Insignia out of mothballed storage, WDLT's HD was waaaay off sync of the analog, so the few people who
could hear it would be treated to constant headaches if they experienced signal dropouts.
Stupidly, they kept the HD on WCOA on when it was talk. But when they flipped to the classic hits "Jet" format, they turned it off. Go figure. The few days it was on with music, though, it sounded fantastic. With no subchannels and light processing, the HD can really sound good. Ditto WBLX. Not my format, of course, but when the HD was on it was really clean and clear and just sounded great. iHeart's HD sounds crappy by comparison, but they run two subchannels on WKSJ, WRKH and WMXC that eat up the bits, AND they seem to still have crappy low bitrate mp3s that they play for music instead of lossless files like a real careful listener would insist on. (Again, probably due to a lack of money from corporate to upgrade. In B'ham, it's the opposite, with Cumulus' stations sounding bad and iHeart's sounding good, bitrate-wise.)
The RDS thing should be pretty easy to implement, but again I question the ability, financially or knowledge-wise, of the Cumulus engineer to actually do any of that. I hate to potentially bad mouth someone that isn't here to defend themselves, but it just seems like the technical side of Cumulus on the gulf coast is... lacking. The RDS failed on WBLX like a year ago and it took them that long to get it on again, and when it was on, it just had gibberish instead of text. Ditto WRRX in Pensacola, which is STILL saying "RDS_PS" in the station name field on all my radios, like the encoder is on its default, waiting to be programmed. It's been that way for at least a year now, maybe two. Then back when 100.7 dropped talk, they were in mono for a week or two but with a stereo pilot, and only airing the left channel of audio so all the music sounded wrong. That's the sort of thing that should be fixed in hours, not weeks.
Sorry for the rant, it just gets on my nerves that we seem to live in a market that corporate radio has entirely forgotten.
