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10/30: HD Radio story
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
i did a story on HD Radio for the Arts & Books section Sunday.
I do have to say it’s so early in HD radio’s life, it’s hard to say how long it will take to penetrate the mainstream mind. I suspect it’s going to be awhile and won’t become a big deal until it starts becoming standard. Very few people are going to go out of their way to get HD radio right now.
Here are some technical feedback from a skeptical reader. I’m no technical expert so if anyone wants to challenge David, feel free:
Mr. Ho —-
A few salient points, requiring only a minimum of research, went missing from your piece on HD Radio:
1) Ibiquity made generous deals with the big radio station owners to get HD broadcasting equipment installed. In turn, radio station owners have additional avenues (i.e., stations or channels) for ad revenue without needing more bandwidth from the FCC.
2) Large radio station owners have proven time and again more stations does not equal more variety. In fact just last week the AJC ran a story on this very subject. True variety only happens when small stations are nourished, something the FCC in recent years has not encouraged. Whatever this is about, is likely NOT about giving consumers something they’ve been hungering for. Witness HD Radio sales (and contrary to the story, a “$200 starting price” ISN’T a significant deterrent.)
3) Caution your editors if you can about hed and dek hype. HD Radio is most definitely NOT “high definition.” Like most things digital, HD Radio is about clean reception and playback, not necessarily better resolution or fidelity. Ibiquity is also guilty of hyperbole. The “demo” available on hdradio.com that purports to compare HD Radio with FM is not only invalid but disingenuous. FM can, under good conditions that admittedly aren’t often met, sound outstanding.
4) HD Radio, while supposedly living on harmony with analog broadcasting, has been shown to in fact further degrade it in some instances due to interference. Analog and digital radio stations must share the same allotted chunk of bandwidth, and making room for digital doesn’t help analog. The FCC, “protector of the people’s airwaves” has similarly turned a deaf ear about this, but that’s another argument.
-David Deckert
Here’s another thought from an analog supporter:
Rodney—
Your story will be well received by those who were raised on digital sound.
However, digital sound is by definition -inferior to analog sound.
All sound waves begin life in the analog format. In order to create digital sound - the analog sound waves are dissected into digital bits. Think of it as you would a digital picture — if you look closer and closer at a digital picture — you eventually see a mosaic of pixels. Digital sound is a pixilated representation of analog sound waves.
Audiophiles have long known that digital sound is by definition, a compromised facsimile of analog. Sure— analog recordings are often plauged by unwanted audio interference and noise—which makes my point: analog is the “whole”, whereas digital is a sum of parts.
Tommy Meers - Decatur
Comments
Commenting is now closed for this entry.
By bud
October 30, 2006 8:56 AM | Link to this
Eric is right…good content will encourage the adoption of HD Radio, much more so than improving audio quality. Even with good speakers, it is quite tough to get to audio quality in your car…lots of road and traffic noise will interfere with the audio.
By obg
October 30, 2006 3:32 PM | Link to this
HD will be like “Quad” and AM Stereo. THE GENERAL PUBLIC COULD CARE LESS! Until radio gives people what they want instead of “hard drive formats” it won’t matter. But the big corporations don’t care. They can expense equipment. Same 100 songs….over and over. Atlanta listeners are numb. Longest drive time and worst radio. Thank God for satellite and ipods.
By LP
October 31, 2006 9:34 AM | Link to this
HD Radio has some potential if the content is produced properly. As an owner of the Boston Acoustics radio, I enjoy the crisp sound and the alternative music choices, especially the variety station that Star 94 broadcasts, The Wolf 101.5, and Jamz which is broadcasts by Kiss 104.1. However, I worry that once the medium penetrates the mainstream audience, the stations will try to compete with each other and become copies of existing formats. Satellite radio does present some competition now but since XM and Sirius have so much debt I am surprised that they can continue without going bankrupt or getting acquired by Clear Channel.
Fortunately, I live near a pirate radio station that plays diverse music and variety programs with no commercials…free of the watered-down formats of all the corporate stations…until the FCC shuts them down for taking away listeners from the mainstream stations like they did with 101.1 FM here http://www.fcc.gov/eb/FieldNotices/2003/DOC-257047A1.html
By Steve Fluker
November 3, 2006 11:59 AM | Link to this
I’m very happy to see comments circulating on HD Radio here. It tells me that the word is getting out to the public. I would like to follow up on comments made by two people with regards to comparing the audio of the analog and digital signals though.
David Dockert in his writing stated that FM radio under perfect conditions can sound outstanding. Thank you. As a broadcast engineer, I take great pride and measures to make the quality of the analog signal sound as good as possible, and I must admit, most people can not tell the difference between a good, strong, clean analog FM station and its HD counterpart. “Perfect conditions� is the key term here though. As you drive away from the tower of an FM station the signal begins to degrade. Car radios begin to roll off the high frequencies and reduce the stereo separation, blending the sound toward mono in an effort to reduce static and hiss inherent in over the air radio signals. Another problem with FM radio is something called multipath. This happens in cities with large buildings and in mountainous areas where the radio signal bounces off of these obstructions and can reach your car radio’s antenna from different directions. The different signals can actually interfere with each other and cause severe static and noise. Maybe you’ve pulled up to a traffic light and had your radio fade out. Drive up a few more feet and the radio station comes back in. This is multipath. HD Radio on the other hand transmits digital data to your radio. Your radio is able to ignore these noises, and still pull out and decode the data. The result is that “perfect conditions� sound, no matter where you drive within the primary coverage area of the radio station. HD Radio also offers an improvement to the low frequency sounds changing that low end rumble we’ve come to know into real distinctive musical notes. You’ll also notice a much cleaner sound in the higher frequencies, particularly in a reduced sibilance in cymbals, brass instruments, and vocal sounds such as the dreaded “S�. I also want to note that the way the data is transmitted with the regular analog signal, that there is no degradation of the original analog radio station. Close attention was paid to this issue during the development of the technology. It quite frankly would not be tolerated.
Another writer stated that digital audio is a “pixilated representation of analog sound waves�. I couldn’t have stated that better myself. You are absolutely right. No matter how far you go with digital, you can never perfectly recreate the original analog signal. Again though, this is under perfect conditions. Unfortunately analog audio begins to degrade the moment it is put on tape through noises generated by the tape itself, both when recorded and again when played back. Every time the audio runs through another amplifier more noise is accumulated and the audio degrades. When broadcast over the air, terrestrial noises become a factor. Digital on the other hand, has the ability to maintain its original quality through adverse conditions much better than analog. No, it’s not perfect, and in fact can easily become worse through the use of data compression methods attempting to put large amounts of audio on small storage devices such as MP3 players. What we have found though is that content is king. The amount of content has become more important to the public than quality. No, I don’t like that personally, but it’s a fact of life. HD radio does take a slight audio quality trade-off to create the new channels on the air which I feel will bring more interest in the technology than the better sound. Fortunately HD Radio can still offer better audio with less noise and static, while STILL adding new channels. You get the best of both worlds.
One last comment on the variety of the programming content. We are all ears! Broadcasters want HD Radio to work too. It’s new to all of us. Don’t just sit back and wait to see what the broadcasters do. Talk to them. Makes suggestions, be involved. That’s what will make the difference.
Steve Fluker Director of Engineering Cox Radio, Orlando