Strubel Responds to Tom Ray

[Tom Wells]

OK, two less listeners in Boston: me and my father. Is that proof enough for you?
It has good ratings despite sounding terrible because of the content.

Do either of you report to Arbitron? Wear a PPM monitor?   If not, it doesn't matter.

That response is really weak and beneath you , A. 

I'd almost think you're having a bad day to make such a personal slap.

[TheBigA]

That response is really weak and beneath you , A. 

I'd almost think you're having a bad day to make such a personal slap.

Personal slap?  Not at all.  This is a very professional statement, reflecting the reality of radio.

WBZ is a commercial radio station.  Its existence is defined by Arbitron, not by individuals.  That is the real world.  It's why clear channel stations don't care about skywaves and reaching 32 states anymore.  They serve a clearly defined area, and their success in doing it is determined by Arbitron.

[KB1OKL]

Actually, it would behoove the pro-HD people to do the same.  Because neither side had any facts here.  I don't have a dog in the fight.  I just want the truth.  So get started.  All I know is that until you can prove to me that IBOC is hurting audience in a quantifiable way, it's all just a lot of bluster.

The quantity of listeners in the Boston area is two less, I just quantified it for you, next argument.

[TheBigA]

The quantity of listeners in the Boston area is two less, I just quantified it for you, next argument.

Once again, unless you carry PPM monitors, your two less people don't register to advertisers.  They are buying the #1 station in Boston.  Regardless of how you & your father feel.

Your argument is invalid, so move on.

[audioguy]

No one's argument is invalid here, BigA. Or to put it another way, yours is no more valid than any of the rest of us.

[TheBigA]

Depends on the goal.  If the view is "IBOC is bad because I don't like it," that's a fine argument amongs the believers.  But a non-scientific argument without meaningful and quantifiable facts will be invalid when you attempt to preach beyond the choir. Most of the anti-IBOC brigade see themselves as scientists.  A review of the scientific method might apply.

[KB1OKL]

Depends on the goal.  If the view is "IBOC is bad because I don't like it," that's a fine argument amongs the believers.  But a non-scientific argument without meaningful and quantifiable facts will be invalid when you attempt to preach beyond the choir. Most of the anti-IBOC brigade see themselves as scientists.  A review of the scientific method might apply.

I'm not a scientist at all, I'm a disgruntled listener who's tired of a station sounding like it's coming through a telephone, my father got tired of the fades which never happened until they turned on the 30 Khz wide hash machine. My father doesn't know why, I do. I don't think scientific arguments matter to the ordinary Joe who's trying to listen to a station that sounds like krap, he won't care why, he'll just turn the station to another one, my father did that. My father's not anti-IBOC, he doesn't know it exists, nor does he care, all he knows is that his station now sounds like krap and it doesn't come in as well as it used to. In fact he now listens to FM, so IBOC forced at least one listener that I know of to switch to FM, it was not the AM band itself, it was IBOC directly even though he doesn't realize it. Next.

[Tom Wells]

As long as we're calling for a strict application of the scientific method, some of you may remember a thread where
Mr. Don Juan severely and unjustly dimissed, repeatedly, an appraisal of FM multipath noise increase. 
The thread did get moved eventually to TIO for one reason of another, even as I defended my assessment of
the phenomenon as a "casual" but impartial judge,  based on my radio engineering education and experience.

Now, here comes the chief scientist on staff at Continental to suggest that increased noise in incidents of
multipath reception may be the result of iboc sidebands.

http://www.rwonline.com/usercontrol/article/105256

Don, your mike is open.   Hello?  Don?
Someone cue Don, please.

[Savage]

Zach, I appreciate the gracious and measured response.  I surmise from your posts that you're not anti-HD, but it's good to have a rational discussion from opposite sides of the controversy.

As far as the Clear Channel bandwidth-reduction experiment on AM goes, I have two comments.

First of all: "punchy and hollow?"  I know we're venturing into the Wilderness of Semantics here, but my experience with IBOC-strangled AM is that 4.5 kHz (the CC IBOC analog "standard") sounds more like telco audio filtered through two or three layers of paper towels.  The clarity and intelligibility are gone - no highs and no lows.  A local IBOC-AM which plays music had a song on some months back which sounded vaguely familiar to me.  I turned the radio up and listened intently; it took me about ten full seconds to realize what it was: James Taylor's "You've Got A Friend," a song I played on the air about 2500 times when it was a current hit.  The audio was so bad it took that long to recognize it.

Secondly: color me suspicious about the CC "experiment."  Since Clear Channel is a major equity investor in iBiquity, I suspect that the experiment likely had to do with assessing whether reducing analog bandwidth would be tolerable when IBOC was rolled out.  I can't imagine any other purpose behind deliberately making one's own station sound worse.  As such the experiment holds the potential being done to justify a pro-IBOC conclusion; e.g., "drawing the curve and then plotting the data."  IBOC is rife with fakery and books-cooking (for example, the revised NRSC "masks") so I would suspect both the methodology and the conclusions until I know better.

I have never encountered a single person - including those working at Alliance-owned AM stations - who thinks that IBOC-strangled audio sounds even acceptable, much less "okay."

[Zach]

In a nutshell, I am very much anti-AM HD, okay with FM HD for the most part and mad that the FCC doesn't take HD interference complaints on both bands more seriously.