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In Reply to: Re: HD artifacts while listening in stereo posted by Vinyl Rules! on November 24, 2006 at 15:20:12:
I appreciate your response to my original post. I have no desire to listen to or purchase HD radio. My concern was what it was doing to standard analog stereo broadcasts. I am completely familiar with the transmission characteristics of HD radio. My issue was, since the artifacts are outside of the carrier, tuners with excellent sideband filtering don't have a problem. Even if the equipment is set up correctly these artifacts can appear if the tuner is poorly designed. I was curious if anyone knew of tuners other than Fanfare or MD that were designed correctly. Your right, a frog in the shower would sound better. COMPRESSION SUCKS!!
Follow Ups:
oldglide wrote,"I was curious if anyone knew of tuners other than Fanfare or MD that were designed correctly."And the answer is still yes: This was a thread several months ago in the FM Tuner Group in Yahoo on this exact subject: Several older vintage tuners were mentioned that were "immune" to the sideband interference from IBOC.
And some of the tuners that were mentioned sell for very reasonable prices on eBay and Audiogon, significantly lower in cost than a new Fanfare or MD. You can join the FM Tuner Group at www.fmtunerinfo.com and read through the postings or do a search once you're a member of this group.
or worse?Thanks!
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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