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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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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?
Keep in mind that digital signalling techniques weren't really invented at all until the 1940s. And that AM was deployed before than, and FM either before that or not much after.
Is it inconceivable to believe a brand new field has seen startingly gains in efficiency in 60 years time? Look at how much modems improved (56kps over the same line that once only supported 150bps...nearly a 400 times gain).
There is no catch. Telecommunications technology has just improved a hell of a lot in the last 100 years.
This is the reason why cell phone provides are so antsy to relaim all those 6 MHz wide UHF allocations....you can use that bandwidth so much more effectively with modern techniques, instead of throwing raw, uncompressed analog data out there.
Also witness the huge number of digital channels cable providers have packed into coax, despite the continued presence of regular TV stations, AND internet connections.
And this is the part where everyone should stop whining about taxes and having to give money to their local learning institution.
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...
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
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.