High definition FM broadcast's ?

I contacted a local radio station (San Francisco Bay Area) and received the comments below from their Chief Engineer:

“As far as "HD Radio" goes, we are not on with it now. We are scheduled to begin next year, probably in the summer. Our audio quality really won't be any better with it in my personal opinion. It will be heavily compressed and there will only be an improvement in the signal to noise ratio if the digital signal works well in your receiving location. As far as FM goes, the existing analog signal won't be degraded much, though some published studies indicate that the overall analog receivers signal to noise ratio is degraded, the "new digital" channel (or channels) is a very low bit rate of something like 96kb. The codec that the system uses, which is not upgradeable has some issues, though reports I have heard state that it's "quite listenable".

On FM channels that "multicast" (add more channels), it all is the divided up 96kb, so the overall quality degrades as you add more channels. I am not really sold on all of this at this point in time. We will see what the market thinks of it, and we will do the finest installation possible, to give the new system the best chance of success, our listeners deserve that”.

Based on comments received so far, it sound like HD radio is not living up to the marketing hype. It may be too early to adopt this technology and I just hope that it gets better over time. I am no longer looking at HD radio.

I read in a reasent stereophile mag that in "most" FM radio stations the content is stored on a hard drive and played back from the hard drives. Unless it's live I don't think you will able to get the high quility analog experence that you once got from FM. You may as well go XM becuse its all digitized anyway.

Mark

From the standpoint of broadcast quality and content, I don't see any advantage of HD Radio over Satellite except for the lack of a subscription fee. Clear Channel will simply be able to narrowcast to smaller, more defined market segments. HD Radio makes perfect business sense for station owners and advertisers.

From and end-user's perspective, the advantage is not so clear.

Gentleman, please keep up the brisk and lively discussion on Fm radio. I'm having my HH scott tuner modded with very good results. Just can't seem yet to beat analog tube Fm performance even though the engineering is nearing 50 years old. Now that's amazing even the new 6,000.00 tuners will get crushed by my HH scott tuner. It's not even close! Keep on bringn it on. Now granted that a much different story with the cd's now a days. SACD/looser! Best wishes and thanks for the great input, Joe

That commerical FM station near me is actually also broadcasting in digital. While I do not have a digital tuner I find that the analog sound quality has improved. Might be just all the new equipment they installed.

Pretty funny..
The thread ask about music on PBS.
I comment there is no longer music on my PBS station (they cancelled it all last summer), just news mostly of a political nature (Washington DC, figures).
Then someone makes a political comment by saying that I did.

I missed the live broadcast on WETA, but they no longer care about the music listener. They are more interested in going up against Rush Limbaugh on the taxpayer's tab. I also miss the live Boston Symphony broadcasts when I lived in that area.

For your sake Bignerd100 all I'll say is I said Democrat. You took that to mean Liberal. Thank you for confirming that the Democrat party is controlled by the left. I am actually a former Democrat who is now non-affiliated. There is no place for moderates like me there. While I will never ever be a Republican I find more and more that I have to mostly vote for Republicans by default.