HD Radio...here it comes!

[Cameron]

...and this is the "big" markets...

I've pretty much come to the conclusion that nobody cares. At least, nobody in charge cares. Okay, that's a gross generalization, but when I hear some of the stuff I've been hearing lately, it makes me feel like nobody cares.

That isn't new, of course. For the last few years, I've heard and seen things going on in radio, some of which I've chronicled here, that made me feel that nobody was paying attention. This week, though, that feeling is just intensifying with each new head-scratchingly puzzling thing I hear. (And this is going to devolve into a rant about HD Radio, among other things, so if you're sick of that, you can skip ahead to the Talk Topics plug)

Some of it is just sloppiness. The jock on a country station who stepped all over about 20 seconds of the vocals of some Taylor Swift song, well, either the guy had no idea how long he had, or something happened with the voice tracking... but since the song had a short intro, even a voice track should have hit the post. And, yes, I heard my share of dead air, weak and underdeveloped talk topics, unprepared personalities, and stop sets filled with PSAs and those painful "Radio Heard Here" things (I know, business is bad, but... wow, that sounds dire) that made me wonder if the PD or GM or Regional VP or anyone with a title was tuning in.

But the worst of it came from my experience playing with one of those Best Buy portable HD Radios. Yeah, yeah, I know. But it's the cheapest and easiest way to get HD in my car, and since I can't get L.A. FMs at my house, that's the only way I can hear what they're doing on those HD subchannel things. And, despite the limited appeal of an FM-only radio in an age when even your keychain can play MP3s, store photos, and cook dinner, it's not a bad little device. In fact, I kinda like it. So when the local Best Buy finally started to sell them, I fought through the mobs of excited HD Radio purchasers and....

Okay, there were no mobs. In fact, that's "Nobody Cares," Chapter 1: If you don't go searching for them, you will never find an HD Radio in the store. These were hanging on a forlorn pegboard all the way in the back of the store, next to the cassette and CD portables, which, sadly, is appropriate company. There were no signs. There were no other models. There was no attempt to educate consumers about the technology. They were just hanging there in the Ghosts of Technology Past department, without even a price sticker on the peg. I don't think the staff even knew they were there. All that stuff from the NAB and the Grand Exalted HD Radio Alliance about major marketing to get people to adopt, embrace, LOVE HD Radio? That's happening in another universe. I think they bought ads on the sides of unicorns. The first portable is out there, in the wild, and there's no marketing for it at all. Nobody cares.

I hooked the thing up to my car radio, and I tried it out. That leads me to "Nobody Cares," Chapter 2: You can't hold an HD signal very long, and that leads to two critical problems. One, you know how the primary HD channel is supposed to cut back to analog when you lose the HD, and cut back to HD when it's available? On several stations in L.A. and San Diego, the analog and digital are not in sync. You're listening to a show and it... stutters. The switch from analog (underwater, bassy) to digital (bright, trebly) is hard enough on the ears; if the two streams are a couple of seconds off, it's impossible. You would think that the people at these stations would notice the problem, but there it was. Nobody cares.

A bigger "Nobody Cares" problem, and one especially acute for talk radio, involves those "multicast" channels. Here's what the HD Radio marketing doesn't tell you: Those channels cut out all the time. You can't listen for very long. And it happens under all conditions. Try this: Clear day, driving along the freeway with line-of-sight to the Los Angeles antenna farm. We had one of the HD-2 channels on, and it would drop out not only while driving under bridges, but every few minutes without any apparent reason. It turns out that HD-2 and HD-3 channels disappear behind any obstruction -- hills, buildings, trees, other cars, Andrew Bynum -- and become unlistenable. They also disappear when there's no obstruction. And the next time I get a press release trumpeting how an AM station is now available on an FM HD-2 channel, I'll know the truth -- you're not adding a thing. The "multicast" channels are unlistenable. Nobody cares.

While we're at it, a couple more multicast complaints -- I heard at least one talk station on an HD3 channel with volume levels that fluctuated so widely that it was impossible to listen for very long (the very lowest, hardest to hear levels were during the actual talk programming; the commercials were louder). Nobody at the station seems to notice. And another HD-2 music channel played the same song every time I checked in, a couple of hours apart; I was unaware of the existence of the All-Ting TIngs channel, and even a fan of "That's Not My Name" could tell you that you probably should throw in another song or two. Just sayin'. Someone should be spending some time making sure that the rotations work, but, after all, nobody's making any money on those channels, because nobody's listening, which is because nobody's being given a compelling reason to buy into the medium, which doesn't always work anyway. This could be fixed, but, well, nobody cares.

Oh, and here's another "Nobody Cares": Proponents always promote the ability of stations to show title and artist information on the receiver's screen, a selling point against satellite radio. But when there's a syndicated show on, I've seen the screen display something like "NWN_2009_07_26_SEG1" for 20 minutes. I've seen one station stuck on "NEW_LEGAL_ID_OCT2008" with the name of the voice guy. Isn't someone at the station supposed to be checking that? I guess nobody is. Nobody cares.

Look, maybe HD Radio isn't fixable, maybe radio has its problems, maybe you're not being paid what you want or you're in fear for your job, but that shouldn't mean the people who run and work in radio shouldn't take some pride in what they're producing. I think a lot of you do take pride, and there's still a lot of excellent information and entertainment being produced and distributed by radio people every moment of every day. But when I hear stations out of sync, dropping signal, changing volume levels, playing the same song over and over, screwing up the song display... clearly, somebody in charge is not listening to their own station. Someone should, because someone else cares: the listeners. Listeners care. I listen, and I care. And if you don't give me what I want, you're telling me to find another station, or another medium.

Please... care.

[engineer]

Please be more positive. The proposed power increase will solve all problems. It will even make analog radios receive HD!

[Cameron]

...is that before or after the transmission lines/antennas burn?

So you get HD-2/3 another 1/4 mile? Big deal.

The consumer wants trouble-free reception that's convenient and compelling to embrace the technology.

HD radio provides none of the above.

[lastone]

Gee....this sounds a lot like HD-TV!! Where are all those free HD shows? And all those "added" channels? The coverage, what coverage? Marketing, marketing, marketing. And the whole damn industry fell for it! Way to go U.S. Gov.; You burnt us a new one....again.

[Big Media]

The only reason we have HDTV so readily available is because congress forced broadcasters to spend the money upgrading transmitters, control rooms, and the like. They forced these changes by shutting off analog transmitters. Without such a mandate, virtually no broadcaster would have bothered and the available of HDTV anything, would be nil.

Soon, consumers began demanding more HDTV content so a push was made to upgrade content to go with it. Now, there are hundreds of HDTV options available. I seriously doubt we would have Discovery HD, HBO-HD, or National Geographic-HD, had there not been this forced investment by the broadcast community first.

As far as radio goes, it is too little, too late. If you shut down FM and AM transmitters and mandated a switch to HD Radio, few would willingly invest in the technology because MP3 players are so prevalent. Like the article pointed out, MP3 players fit on your key chain, have excellent sound quality, and offer no reception problems.

There may be a comma missing from this post. If so, look under the couch cushions.

[Ace Purple]

There are some places that have great HD side-channel offerings, but they're mostly big cities like NYC, Chicago, etc. Nashville is okay with it, and it works out pretty well with my Accurian HD Radio. I've never heard HD Radio in a car so I can't compare/contrast experiences with that.

[AmpedNow]

Gee, for a supposedly dead technology, it still gets a lot of hatred. The HD board over at R-I is pretty much unreadable, if you're looking for even a slight balance.

I'm now convinced that most of this hatred is from old timers who don't like change, and DX geeks, who would still be complaining about digital even if we went with any other digital standard, such as the Eureka system. As the article mentions, most people don't care either way.

Of course, I don't know what's so bad about radio providing extra data -- whether that be extra subchannels, artist/title tagging, album art, and other things such as weather and traffic alert scrolls. All things HD can provide. RDS is nice, but still rather limited.

AM is walking dead. We all know it. So, who cares about AM HD...

I don't see HD as "saving" radio, but rather a natural "evolution", depending on your perspective.

But ultimately, it's laughable to think that old analog broadcasting (and AM radio, period) will still be everywhere by, say, 2050. I would hope everything will be digital by then. The interference issues come from saddlebagging the digital data on an analog signal. Drop the analog, the interference problems would be self correcting.

[fearpeddler]

Gee....this sounds a lot like HD-TV!! Where are all those free HD shows? And all those "added" channels?

gotta be in the midwest or western part of the country or in a major metro area....

[lastone]

As a delivery medimum, digital is near perfect if done right. However, the technology has not reached the level of performance required for broadcast use. Like digital audio, if you have to reboot the damn thing half dozen times a day...what good is it really?

Radio that stops dead and video that goes black is more prevalent today than at any time when "humans" were involved. And this is considered "normal"? And 720P is considered HD? Hell, that's only 195 lines more than black & white!

And in 2050 I'll be three worms shy of dust, and you'll be listening to memory crystals.

This is nuts.
Or as a certain professor said: "The whole world is crazy except me and you. And I'm not so certain about you"!


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[Big Media]

Radio that stops dead and video that goes black is more prevalent today than at any time when "humans" were involved. And this is considered "normal"?

I hear ya. As more control rooms are centralized, this will become more common.

And 720P is considered HD? Hell, that's only 195 lines more than black & white!

Having DirecTV with HD channels, I can tell a difference between digital SD and HD channels but only when I am paying attention. The picture quality of DirecTVs SD channels is so good that the difference is marginal.

But, when you do a back-to-back comparison, those 195 lines stand out like Rubben Studdard at a vegan festival.

[genlock]

Actually standard definition tv is 480i (4x3). (480i can also be 16x9)
That is 240 lines scanned (odd lines), then 240 lines scanned (even lines)
So 720p would be 720 lines scanned in the same refresh rate.
In my way of seeing it, that is 3 times as good without the problems
of the interlaced scan. The main reason that the directv sd looks so good is that
it was digitized at the earliest possible point and not returned to analog video
till the last possible point in transmission. If you have your tv set hooked to your sat rcvr with a component
cable, then you remove the biggest obstacle in the chain, the ntsc encoding of the tv signal.
TV has cleaned up a lot in the last decade because of the movement to digital.