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Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio! |
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Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio! |
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In Reply to: what are the audio manifestations? birdies? posted by mhardy6647 on November 29, 2006 at 10:10:36:
Most stations currently do a piss-poor job of engineering HD Radio. And many stations still don't even have an HD Radio to monitor what they are broadcasting! How dumb is that?Anyway, to answer your question, when an analog station starts broadcasting HD Radio, most people in the Tuner Information Group in Yahoo (you can get to them via www.fmtunerinfo.com) report a slight decrease in the analog FM signal strength, a decrease in the sound quality of the analog FM signal that can range from slight to severe, an increase in the background noise (more hiss) of the received signal [This is caused by some artifacts from the HD Radio processing "leaking" into the analog FM signal and is the result of poor engineering], and worst of all, many HD Radio stations "knock" adjacent channels off the air.
This has happened where I live: We have a station at 88.5, WFDD, the Wake Forest public radio station. When the public radio station at 88.7, WNCW, began broadcasting an HD radio signal, it interferred with WFDD's signal in much of WFDD's listening area. I have exchanged emails with the station manager at WFDD and he told me they received many complaints about a significant decrease in WFDD's signal quality once WNCW went to HD radio broadcasting. I've tried to explain to him what is happening, but he's not a technical type and seems to have trouble accepting the fact that the FCC would approve a broadcast technology that would interfere with adjacent channell stations if not engineered perfectly. And almost no station is installing HD radio well since they all use contract engineers and these engineers are on the clock and are not given the time to do their job right.
So besides a lower quality audio signal, more noise, and the possibility that an adjacent station that broadcasts HD radio can knock your station off the air, what else do you want to know ;-)
Remember, the scumbags at Ibiquity, the owner of HD Radio, claim its 96Kbps bitrate is "CD quality."
Work the math: A CD's bit rate is 1,440Kbps versus the 96Kbps bitrate of an HD radio broadcast. That is a LOT of bits and information the HD radio CODEC has to discard.
Do you really believe you are going to hear "CD Quality" when this many bits are discarded?
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Follow Ups
- Re: what are the audio manifestations? birdies? - Vinyl Rules! 17:49:24 12/06/06 (0)
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