good old tuners going obsolete

KT88 makes a good point. Turntables are still useful as we keep our own LP collection. A tuner is dependent on the radio station. Once the station drops the "software", the tuner is useless.

I've been noticing a trend for many years. Radio station equipment is getting cheaper and losing audio quality at the same time. Digital processing is now used for compression and to limit phase modulation. The "encoders" don't appear to be concentrating on sonics. Just features and price.

Seems pretty obvious that as radio stations upgrade to the newer equipment to jam in more stations on each tower, the sound quality will suffer.

The HD channels are not high definition, except by branding. I believe they are merely bit-limited compressed digital audio, probably MP3 or similar. Old analog FM is far superior in terms of sonics. It can actually be quite good. Not sure how many broadcasters are still using such a quality setup. Maybe one?

jh

Kt_88,

Can you cite a source for your information that all OTA broadcast is going digital by late 2009? As a huge FM fan, I'd be very interested. Thanks.

David

This HD issue has been beaten to death on the FM Tuner forum. I'm hoping that someone from that forum will jump over here to give their enlightened viewpoints. I also am a die-hard FM lover. I don't know what I'd do without my beloved NPR station not broadcasting in FM anymore. I also have a highly modified vintage Citation Eighteen that would be very sad if I had to turn it into a "door stop".

Most of what I read was items listed in the technology sections of various web pages such as yahoo. I will do my best to find these pages agian though. But it is common knowlegde to any Best Buy or Circiut City or any other electronics store you go into. Even the CTR TV's over 24" have digital tuners in them now. I have been in the cable TV industry for over 12 years and we saw it coming 7 years ago. FCC mandate " All signals must be digital 12-29-09 "

I my self enjoy NPR through my analog tuner. I also listen to other stations and was actaully considering buying an even better Sansui tuner than what I have now. Then I remembered what was going to happen in 09. But the real kicker was when a small local station said they are getting close to launching 3 digital channels.

I agree, they are not HD, just digital.

Here is a bit of it. You can read the entire concept if you follow the link and form your own opinion.

" The transition from analog to digital technology could be made in any number of ways--the possible architectures for a new band plan are as infinite as the engineering imagination. The most popular transition model in use around the world today is the Eureka 147. In this model, an existing radio station receives a new swath of spectrum from which to broadcast its digital signal. Over time, the station's analog signal is terminated and new stations are allowed to use the vacated bandwidth. This model has been proven effective in efficiently allocating new and existing audio space.

The U.S. implementation model before the Federal Communications Commission, however, is quite different. Called the In-Band-On-Channel plan, it allows existing stations to use the space on and around their current analog channel to broadcast the digital signal. For example, a station broadcasting at 97.9 would use the space between it and the stations next to it on the dial for its digital broadcasting. When its analog signal is eventually terminated, the entire swath of bandwidth would belong to that station. "

http://oldsite.prometheusradio.org/artdigital.shtml