good old tuners going obsolete

I believe I was the first to post here on Audiogon about so-called HD RADIO. The first responses were that I was joking.

Then, someone posted a link to the folks who had gotten FCC clearance to develop the standards for this new product. This person, as I recall, worked for the company.

I then watched as the first receivers, Pioneer I believe, for automobiles came into the market. I even traced down an outlet that had a demonstration of the two(!) radio stations then broadcasting in 'HD' in my major metropolitan area.

The first in-home receivers came from DAYSEGUERRA, which was really a high-end studio monitor built for the stations broadcasting in HD. Since then a few others, like Audio Design Associates (www.ada-usa.com) entered the high-end market and now I believe Cambridge Soundworks has a product.

As close as I have followed this, I have opted to go digital, but not OTA(off the air). As I have recently posted elsewhere I had the opportunity to visit slimdevices and I purchased the TRANSPORTER which they featured at an open house. The Transporter was back-ordered so they gave me a squeezebox to tide me over.

The Transporter has a high-end DAC made for internet streaming audio and it interfaces real well with my Apple Computer. Almost my entire most often played library of CDs is now on my computer and this device is all I could have hoped for. As I live on the West Coast I can tune into late-night East Coast stations to pick-up their late night feeds that are pretty much chatter and commercial-free.

I do believe that internet radio will out compete the so-called HD Radio, at lest in the home environment which is why even the manufacturers have invested so much into automobile units.

That certainly takes care of TV, but we're talking about radio here.

I just called the engineer at our local NPR station, and asked him specifically about a timetable for analog radio conversion, and he said that none exists. If fact, they're just now writing a grant for their HD equipment, and won't have it installed until mid 2009 at the earliest. He's not worried about missing any deadlines.

I asked him about sound quality, and he said that while the HD bandwidth is limited to 96k, it's an AAC stream and thus, just as Apple claims with their iTunes downloads, the sound quality is about twice that of an MP3 at the same bitrate. The problem will be when stations want to run multiple broadcasts and start splitting up the stream. The limit is 96k total, so the quality of each stream will be limited.

There is another station here streaming at 64k AAC+, and it sounds pretty good, not quite the frequency or dynamic range of the analog signal, but quieter, even on a good analog day. If stations will utilize their full bandwidth for one broadcast stream, HD might be pretty palatable. I fear, though, that commerce will win out over quality, and we'll rarely if ever see a full 96k stream.

I also find it interesting that the drop dead date for analog TV is 2/17/09, about a month after Bush leaves office. I predict that the first big act of whoever gets elected will be to stay the FCC mandate, and that analog TV (along with analog radio) will still be alive for a number of years. The marketplace will fix the time of death for analog broadcasting, not the government.

David

Is there anything on the radio worth listening to? I live in the NY metro area and frankly, it seems like a wasteland....

"The marketplace will fix the time of death for analog broadcasting, not the government."

Armstrod,
I hope you are right. I will hope that FM analog will live on for a while.

I agree with Armstod (Armstrad made some pretty good tuners in the UK, BTW), but I believe that commerce will play an important role. Radio stations can barely hold on to listeners as it is, it would seem that they would be reluctant to diminish their listener base, and hence income stream, when the gear to continue to cater to it is already there and paid for.