more HD Radio reception from Australia

[Savage]

It's unbelievable the stuff I hear on the air (or hear NOT on the air) these days.  Small wonder companies are having revenue losses.  They''re not reducing staff - they're cutting into muscle and bone.  If you don't care about your on-air product, you can't expect the listeners or advertisers to.

I recently heard a local corporate-owned Class A on the air in town with nothing but a dead carrier - for a DAY.  As recently as ten or fifteen years ago this would have gotten somebody fired. 

It makes me glad our studios, offices and transmitter are co-located - any outage is very quickly addressed.  Like this morning when the Jim Bohannon Westwood One feed went out while they tinkered with the satellite power....we spun the hits for about ten minutes.  Otherwise there would have been ten minutes of dead air.

[Savage]

Yeah, radioman - there's an HD-1 in the region (full Class B) that's been broadcasting for the better part of a YEAR with extremely low modulation - sounds like less than 5% - and a loud 60 Hz hum.

Makes you wonder if it's deliberate - as in, "we hate this thing, but we signed a contract with iBiquity.  So there it is.  It's on the air.  Leave me alone."

GREAT testimonial for the wonderfulness of IBOC.

[Play Freebird]

Yeah, radioman - there's an HD-1 in the region (full Class B) that's been broadcasting for the better part of a YEAR with extremely low modulation - sounds like less than 5% - and a loud 60 Hz hum.

Makes you wonder if it's deliberate - as in, "we hate this thing, but we signed a contract with iBiquity.  So there it is.  It's on the air.  Leave me alone."

I happened to discuss that situation with the station's Chief Engineer this week.  Part of the problem is that the company won't purchase HD receivers for engineering staff (or for that matter, any staff), so if the HD equipment has a problem, nobody knows until a listener calls to report it.  I guess there aren't any listeners!

The whole thing just amazes me.  The people running these companies are willing to sink millions into their capital budgets for HD transmitters (and even more money to bail out iBiquity), yet they refuse to spend a couple hundred dollars on a car radio. 

[ajc_trw]

You'll know if it's digital AM when the noise floor drops out to reveal those wonderful sachharine artificial highs that grate like fingernails on a chalkboard through a decent system.

And this, in a nutshell, is why AM-HD is a horrible idea and will fail. Why would anyone listen to such a grating sound? This is NOT FM quality, it's not even internet quality anymore as all the stations I listen to via WinAmp blow away anything i've heard from AM-HD.

BTW what is the average bitrate for AM-HD? I'd like to take a CD track and encode it to HE-AAC to see if I can get better audio. I know IBOC uses HDC, I just want to know how bad the proprieitary system is and how it will eventually kill what it hoped to give life to. 

[Savage]

ajc, I believe the bitrate for AM HD is 16 kbps.  If anyone here has better information feel free to correct me.

On our station's live webstream the bitrate is 96 kbps, which we regard as the minimum for acceptable quality - MONO.  Yes, I know the codecs and compression algorithms are different - but they're not THAT different.

Freebird, maybe the reason that station won't buy receivers for the engineers and staff: these days, stations don't need ANOTHER morale problem!   

[SUPERCASTER]

HD radio interference can be heard in Australia, but the actual HD radio program audio can not be reliably heard within plain sight of the broadcasting towers.

Analog reception occasionally is less then perfect, but most listeners are satisfied. Not so with problematic HD radio.

If the future of broadcast AM FM radio is totally dependent on the success of HD radio, then AM and FM broadcast radio has no future.

It's time to turn off the HD radio buzz bomb.

[dxer2_2000]

Supercaster - be careful not to misinterpret information - there is no interference from HD radio out here - if there was, it would be well buried under 1575 or 1584. All I get is HD dectection from KMIK but it never decodes despite a great signal at times.

dxer2_2000

[SUPERCASTER]

Perhaps a better choice of words would be HD radio "noise", instead of "interference". As you say, it never decodes, so noise is probably a better description. Correct?

[radioman148]

Yeah, radioman - there's an HD-1 in the region (full Class B) that's been broadcasting for the better part of a YEAR with extremely low modulation - sounds like less than 5% - and a loud 60 Hz hum.

Makes you wonder if it's deliberate - as in, "we hate this thing, but we signed a contract with iBiquity.  So there it is.  It's on the air.  Leave me alone."

GREAT testimonial for the wonderfulness of IBOC.

Amazing that the audio could be so bad and nobody would care.

[KB1OKL]

Makes you wonder if it's deliberate - as in, "we hate this thing, but we signed a contract with iBiquity.  So there it is.  It's on the air.  Leave me alone."

GREAT testimonial for the wonderfulness of IBOC.

I would be willing to bet this goes on a lot, because no able engineers would willingly transmit krap signals unless they were secretly trying to sabotage something they were forced to install that they did not believe in. Either that or they just give up and realized it's hopeless and dead even if they did perhaps believe in IBOC at some time.