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High Definition Radio is Here
nfranzen submits this story/advertisement: "Yesterday, I had the opportunity to buy the first High Definition (HD) Radio in the United States. HD Radio, invented by iBiquity Digital, adds a digital channel to the sidebands of an existing analog FM signal. The technology is still pretty new, but I can tell you first-hand that listening to my favorite local FM station in HD sounds just like I am listening to a CD. Well, except for the commercials (grin). Here are some links to local TV news coverage and a news release for more info. HD receivers will hit the open market following the Consumer Electronics Show next week in Vegas." We had an old story about the FCC approving these digital broadcasts in the FM radio bands.
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Never confuse volume with power.
Realistically speaking, the only big problem with FM radio quality is that it attenuates above 16kHz . . . a range that you more or less can't hear in the poor listening environments where FM is typically used (vast majority of the time being, of course, in moving vehicles).
Worth it? Yeah, I spend an average of an hour a day driving. It's definitely worth it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Encoding digital signals in a small amount of bandwidth has to come with a catch. What's this sound like if the signal strength is low? What kind of digital qaulity is this? Is there lossy compression used?
Is this all digital or dual mode? I still steer clear of all-digital networks of cell phones simply because the range is shorter. Instead of getting static when the signal gets weak it just shuts off. Anybody know if this is the case on these things?
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
That's an interesting alternative to satellite radio. Both require new equipment, both have very high quality. Satellite radio has little or no advertising, but you do have to pay a monthly subscription fee.
High definition photos of Mars and now High definition radio? I do believe /. is spoiling us.
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
Or on my crappy $10 headphones. Or at the gym, cranked up to distortion levels on the hifi system. Seriously folks, few people listen to FM in an environment where 'high definition' radio makes a difference. Its like playing crappy MP3s on your free-with-the-PC speakers - you can't even tell that the MP3s suck, because the speakers suck more. I guess hearing the voices on NPR at 16bit,44.1KHz may make some people's day, but this is not like the upgrade path from tape to CD. This is a product looking for a market.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Do two violations make a compliance?
These are the questions that plague mankind...
The sound quality of today's FM radio is fairly good, but the quality of the actual content is not. And it seems to be getting worse by the day.
The same goes for television. Who needs digital high resolution television if there isn't anything you want to watch?
While you exploit your analog "hole" (until its shut off. DAB is a long way off, but analog TV should be off in 10 years) in reception, millions others will exploit the rarely used "headphone" socket.
Um, it's digital, so there won't be any static. Poor signal will probably sound like a bad cell phone connection, with cutouts, echos, and "robot voices." I think I'd prefer the static.
Digital?? Thieves they are, thieves I say! Quick, pass some legislation to outlaw recievers (or at least make sure they cant *shudder* record anyting!)
Sincerely,
Your recording industry representative
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Which brings me to a second point: nearly all radio today is utter crap. The sort of early adapter who would be willing to shell out $400 extra for digital FM is exactly the kind of person who already shelled out $400 for satellite radio. And why would anyone with that kind of discretionary income want to listen to anything on the FM dial? At the risk of sounding terribly elitist, if you're smart enough to have earned gobs of money, your tastes are likely discriminating enough to want to want nothing to do with what's on the FM band.
The one kind of station that might benefit from high fidelity is NPR, but considering that they're bellyaching for cash every twelve weeks or whatever during pledge drives, this is probably the last type of organization who could cough up the extra dough.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Their playlist is the same-old same-old. Listening to it in CD quality won't make it sound any better.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Everything that's good about HD Radio is better when you spend (less) money on an in-car MP3 player. Flash memory, thank you, and it doesn't skip. And commercials don't exist. After all, I think most of us probably have a very diverse, vast collection of music on our hard drives already.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Here in the UK, DAB is no longer a long way off. The BBC have been heavily promoting it, and it does seem to have finally left the ground.
I recently bought a DAB radio alarm, and I find the quality is pretty good. Admittedly, I can't tell if it is better or worse than FM through the speaker on the radio itself (although that rather reinforces what others have said on this story - that FM quality is not the limiting factor in most listening environments). Sometime, I mean to plug it into my HiFi and see if I can hear any difference.
Anwsers here especially this one...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Why does telephony have to be 8-bit 8KHz audio in the VoIP era? If it doesn't have to go through the 64Kb/s phone system, the audio could be far better.
Works fine, all the benefits of digital (MP2) and selling better than their non digital counterparts.
I've got one on my computer, 40, and it can download data, music, etc.
High Definition sounds kind of misleading for this technology.. Detail on the quality of the broadcasts is conspicuously absent from the information I could find on this technology. They only describe it as "CD-like".
So, where High Definition video is clearly defined as 1920x1080i or 1280x720p (~ 5x the resolution of a DVD), "HD" radio is lower quality than a 25 year old audio standard.
They should stick to caling it what it is, Digital Radio. It's really cool technology, with a lot of advantages over analog - but it's not setting a new bar for quality like HDTV is compared to DVD.
"HD" Radio (formerly known as IBOC, or In Band on Channel), is an inferior technology which many have found less than awe inspiring. It's adoption in the U.S. is the result of politics and money, not technological superiority.
One reviewer above described IBOC thus: "Let's start with audio quality. It's my opinion that the current 96kb/s codec is incapable of reproducing even a simple male voice without generating objectionable artifacts. It gets worse with music. On the classical cut the strings were thin and harsh. For those of you who are broadcasting contemporary formats, the codec removes sibilance unnaturally, changes the timber of symbols and makes back up vocals strident. This is not CD-quality by a long shot. In fact, during my listening test I found that our station's plain old analog signal sounded better than the 96kb/s codec."
At the same time that the U.S. has locked themselves into IBOC, the rest of the world has been moving ahead with Eureka 147 DAB, a purely Digital technology without the legacy concerns. Fifty countries and counting, with DAB building steadily, especially in Europe.
Three Squirrels
96kbps stream is not CD quality. Their algorithm is proprietary - no chance for an online comparison to ogg/mp3. Then when the station starts using the secondary audio channel for added revenue at 32kbps, their main channel is now 64kbps... gee wiz, sign me up for upgrading all my radios. The FCC should have done the same for radio broadcasters that they did for TV broadcasters. Given them a new frequency band for digital. Instead radio broadcaster have to squeeze this digital stream on the same packed frequency band the analogs are on. (until all the analog receivers are gone and then they'll go all digital - that's the "plan" anyway - lame). AM is on the same path by the way. except 32kbps. they also can't figure out how to keep the digital signal contained at night. so no digital at night for AM. Digital would be great given higher bit rates, but this is not the way!!
It's astonishing to see how far the USA is prepared to be isolated from the rest of the world when it comes to technological standards like this. The rest of the world is switching to Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) for digital radio as a replacement for FM, with countries like the UK being particularly advanced in their adoption. Here's a map showing DAB adoption across the world - notice the big empty space where the US is? Instead the US have decided to go it alone with this hybrid solution that will be the NTSC of the radio world. What a pity...
I've had a DAB radio for six months now and have been really impressed with the sound quality, ease of tuning and extra information that's displayed with each broadcast. No more trying to guess the band playing a particular song - it scrolls automatically along the LCD display. Want to see what stations are available? Just scroll through the list, rather than speculatively twiddling a knob and trying to identify something through the white noise. There's a whole world out there that the US is missing out on...
If it takes 21 years to go from 405 to 625/PAL which has a clearly explainable advantage to the average consumer, and where sets were unreliable, then it's going to take a lot longer to eliminate analog.
Also the reason for wanting to do it has gone - they can't make money selling spectrum any more.
Well, there is a lot of analog out there, more than digital, but that's not really the problem - the problem is the "digital cliff" effect.
With AMPS, as the signal gets weaker, the audio noise floor comes up, and you get wideband static on the signal. Wideband static is fairly benign, in that humans aren't as offended by it (since it sounds like the surf). The user of the phone knows he is getting out of range well before the call drops, and so usually can terminate the call gracefully.
With digital, you get no real degradation of the signal so long as the channel bit error rate is less than the channel's error recovery capability. But when the BER gets above that threshold, then the quality drops dramatically. Moreover, the loss of quality is expressed as garbled vocoder output (I've always described it as "watery" - it sounds like you have water in your ears), or as complete failures of the vocoder (dropouts). Those are VERY offensive to the ear.
Also, the difference between a signal level that gives you a fully correctable BER and a signal level that gives you a BER bad enough the phone drops is almost nil - so just changing position can drop the call without warning.
Personally, if the phone makers would tie the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) into a variable noise generator, so that as the RSSI fell you started to get static, I think most people wouldn't bitch so badly about dropped calls.
There is also the problem that the usual vocoders for phone use are compressing the crap out of the signal - taking a 64 kb/second audio stream down to less than 4kb/sec. VSELP, IMBE and AMBE all do OK when fed voice in isolation, but put in any background noise and they get "confused" - they start making poor choices about the vectors they encode, and what comes out the other end is pretty rocky.
I had great fun feeding the first few seconds of Kansas's "Carry On Wayward Son" into an APCO-25 IMBE vocoder. While there is nothing but voice there, it is a chorus, and the poor vocoder just couldn't figure out what was going on.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The have had the same system (as the BBC) in several cities in Canada for several years now.
The US system is completely incompatible, of course. In 10 years when I drive my car across the USA/Canada border, my radio will stop working. Nice.
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Why would anyone want High Def radio when you can get an Ipod and carry 5000+ songs with you everywhere in CD-like quality? I hardly listen to radio now and not because of FM audio quality issues. Shuffle play on my Ipod is far more intersting than anything played on Radio.
No-one sees the point of buying HD radio, after all who wants to hear 25 out of every 60 minutes listening to HD commercials. Better to just get an MP3 player, since we all have all the music we want on our hard drives anyways.
But wait, if we all stopped unlawfully copying music to our hard drives, perhaps RIAA would stop trying to reclaim the lost revenues from other sources (read: increasing radio royalties), which would in turn allow the radio stations to reduce the ad content to bearable levels. (Okay, so the royalties aren't likely to come down in the near future, but no need to drive them higher...)
Or alternatively you could go with satelite radio, but that has subscription costs, because they don't have commercials, but the subscription costs are pretty high, because they have to pay those same royalties, because RIAA perceives that they are losing money to our hard drives.
So, before you pan radio for the problems, think about how much you have contributed to the sources of those problems.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
As anybody with an appreciation for music can tell you:
No highs, no lows, must be Bose!
Seriously, Bose sucks. And it has nothing to do with the article. Your Bose doesn't get HD radio.
If you want to hear a real audio dream, find a Martin-Logan dealer and take a listen.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Sorry, that's rubbish - but I can see whey you're getting confused. Rather than get together and agree on an international standard, it seems we're being treated to a country-by-country bodge job.
However most of the systems being implemented at the moment use some variant of the UK-led DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) system, the main difference being what frequency range you broadcast on.
That said most DAB radios now being sold in the UK are multi-frequency and so can be used in other imlementing the system (France in particular have a pilot system in place at the moment). Oh, and Canada :-)
DAB is great - apart from the fact that it uses MP2 as the codec. Coupled with the fact that most UK stations have picked a woeful bitrate, the result is far from hi-fi quality; actually a step back from FM quality IMHO (especially if you have a high end FM radio that can get rid of multipath distorsion).
Look here for more info on DAB.
On the plus side, you do have lots of stations to choose from on Digital, including the excellent BBC7 on which the Beeb have been dusting off some of their best radio comedy, drama and documentary series.
Absit Invidia
invented? thats a strong word. patented may be closer to reality. I havent gone through each patent but its likely that only iBiquity can say who makes these new HD-FM radios.
If the FCC is going to be blessing a new standard for radio, it should be a free and patent unencumbered standard.
Not that more bandwidth is bad, but the real excitement in radio these days is new ways to use it, more features.
For example, since it's so easy and cheap to do, why not a car radio with Tivo like functions:
a) Recording multiple stations at once, letting me switch among the recordings, FF, pause and rewind among them. Heck, with software radio record _all_ the stations, all the time.
b) Know the local traffic stations (ie. traffic every 10 minutes on the 8s) and record that slot and give it to me at the touch of a button, or better still just tune in some digital traffic service that will tell me only of my route.
Ditto the news, always record the latest newscast, let me hear it any time I want.
c) Of course let me pause and resume. Also record my favourite talk shows (NPR for example) like Tivo, and let me play them.
d) Have a speech interface so I don't have to look at the radio to select programs or tune it or otherwise control it! Just give me a little wheel or 4-way control on the wheel similar to what MP3 players have.
e) And of course, what I am now playing with is using an MP3 jukebox to forget about radio entirely, exept for news, traffic and weather.
I download NPR programs into the jukebox to listen to them. I can even record Morning Edition in the early morning and listen to it in the morning commute, except with FF and pause etc.
Plus of course, music, which Mp3 jukeboxes do just great.
f) Speaking of radio, put 802.11 in the car MP3 player so when it notices it is parked in the driveway, it syncs up my latest music and audio.
More bandwidth is of course nice, but boring.
Think about cool features.
DAB is 10 years old already according to this history page.
OK, I'm supposed to get excited about FM radio now? Give me a break - I've had an XM Radio for 2 years and I will NEVER listen to commercial FM radio again. Silence is better entertainment. There used to be good radio, but it's very hard to find - and not worth the effort. The almighty dollar has driven everything to the LCD - except when the dollar pays for quality like HBO, and the satellite radio services.
It doesn't appear that anybody cares! And I'm not surprised; I don't care either. Sure, the idea might be somewhat cool, but the slashdot crowd has evolved along with the rest of the world out of the dot-com era where "cool new technology" was assumed to translate into something that will improve our lives. Just as nobody orders groceries through a web site, nobody turns on their FM radio for good entertainment anymore.
:)
My morning commute is 20 minutes long, and I don't want to spend 12 of those minutes listening to advertisements. I don't care what American media says, I don't need to purchase products to be happy. I don't need a new SUV (or a used one, for that matter) and tonight I won't be tuning into the latest episode of Fox's newest, most outrageous reality series that everyone will be talking about tomorrow. My morning commute is where I clear my head and prepare to deal with the onslaught of crap that I'll face at work. For that, the Dodge Durango jingle just won't work - sorry, but I need <insert your favorite band here>.*
This is a solution to the wrong problem. We're not concerned with the quality of the FM radio feed, we're concerned with the idiots sending out the signal! This move is just a diversionary tactic that will result in crisp, clear crap. If I ever get tired of listening to my own albums, I'll be looking towards XM or Sirius.
*I hate when people name-drop their favorite obscure band in an attempt to show off how cool they are. Just pretend I mentioned your favorite musician. And I'll pretend that your favorite musician is as cool as mine.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Kenwood has a HD radio module that you can add to an existing car receiver. $500! What a bargain!
Kenwood KTC-HR100
Schlock is schlock, whether it be analog or digital.
Give the masses what they want: Better programming! There's a ton of good stuff to listen to out there, but the powers that be (Clear Channel, et al) keep broadcasting the same tired trash. And then the recording industry wonders why CD sales are down.
Sheesh.
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
Have you ever listened to digital radio in the UK? I have no idea what these amateurs are thinking. No stations want to spend money on it and to get their signal to the multiplexes they seem to use low bitrate connections.
So what you end up with is the music first comming out of a 256Kbit MP2 radio automation system, then going into a 128Kbit line, only to be decoded and re-encoded in 128Kbit for the DAB multiplex again.
Now if that isn't bad enough, they can't seem to match levels. The signals are heavily processed, just like FM, so it would be easy to make the use maximum modulation without clipping. But many don't; one station will be at 100%, while the next wil be at -12dB, with some others in between.
So terrible encoding artifacts and unmatched levels, yes, DAB in the UK is a great thing. At least with an IBOC system and engineers that care, there is some chance of it sounding OK. Though I have to admit that 96Kbit sounds a bit low and again, thanks to station engineers caring in the US, analog FM will probably sound better in good receiption areas and equipment.
odds are that you won't be happy in or with the vehicle. (From listening to the crapy music or to the subliminal messages [telling you to buy a new car,] or to the voices inside your head [telling you to drive into that bridge abutment and take out that crowd waiting at the bus stop.]?)
I'm with you in regards to the RIAA and the sucking chest-wound rattling wheeze we call the music industry. Its just a noise industry. They neither make or promote the creation of any music.
I have about 620 CDs. I've ripped about half of them to iTunes. I also have almost as much vinyl which I am ripping slowly to iTunes. I broadcast them all over the condo over a WAP to my other boxen and listen that way. (I've also hooked up one of my boxen to my stereo.
To people who tell me that if I don't listen to radio I don't know what's the latest, I reply, "The latest what? The latest 'dong' song from the latest 'group du jour'? Scrap that rap crap too! I'll keep listening to Bach, Beethoven and Brams. And these guys are not writing anymore."
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