HD vs Satellite Radio

[DSpud]

HD radio does not mean Hybrid Digital Radio. From Wikipedia...

According to iBiquity, the name "HD Radio" is simply iBiquity's brand for its digital radio technology,[2] however according to the HD Radio Alliance the HD means Hybrid Digital. [3]

iBiquity invented the technology, so I am going to take their stance on this issue over the alliance put together to put out postive P.R.

 

[norman]

I am in the Charlotte NC area 9If anyone has experience with either)

I have. I live in Pageland SC. I have a Omni fm antenna that I made connected to a Sherwood HD receiver. I receive about 25 HD stations from no and sc.

 

[navychop]

I believe it originally was Hybrid Digital, perhaps with the hope people would think High Definition. Then they changed it.

Doesn’t really matter.

I’m hoping for a true digital, worldwide standard.


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[harshness]

I believe it originally was Hybrid Digital, perhaps with the hope people would think High Definition. Then they changed it.

Kind of like how 4K TV was officially declared UHD and then slid back to being 4K.

Market pressures do more than determine street price.

There are three candidates (DAB>DRM>ISDB-T) for a digital worldwide standard for audio broadcast but like the metric system, none of them will be adopted in the US because that's not how we do things.

 

[TheForce]

Kind of like how 4K TV was officially declared UHD and then slid back to being 4K

Most of my compatriots in the Video business refer UHD to 3840x2160 resolution, while 4K is 4096 x 2160. Manufacturers who support both resolutions use the same nomenclature. You don't see much 4096 in the consumer markets though. I only have two cameras that support both.


I have sirius XM and like it but it has gotten expensive over the years. Been considering dropping it from my one car since I don't drive it enough to justify the cost. However, if your car supports it, Sirius/XM has an add on called Travel link that generates features overlay on your satellite maps for traffic hotel and gas prices as well as weather radar maps all from the bird and doesn't require LTE internet like most other GPS systems use. If you travel on road trips and your car supports it, it is a great add-on worth looking into.

 

[harshness]

Most of my compatriots in the Video business refer UHD to 3840x2160 resolution, while 4K is 4096 x 2160.

Videographers and cinematographers need to distinguish between DCI 4K and SMTPE UHDTV1 but if you Google 4K, they know what consumers are looking for. Googling UHD gets you explanations of what UHD is where that's not required for 4K.

You don't hear anyone talking about IBOC DAB Radio because HD Radio doesn't require a PhD in acronyms to remember. Of course it is kind of academic as HD Radio is almost as obscure as AM Stereo and probably not as popular as weather radio.

 

[navychop]

As I understand it, my 2016 Outback will tune to an HD station over the regular station, regardless of what you want.


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[TheKrell]

As I understand it, my 2016 Outback will tune to an HD station over the regular station, regardless of what you want.

OK, I give. Why would you want to tune to the FM broadcast without the added benefit of the digital enhancement?

 

[navychop]

I don’t like the hammerlock on HD radio and it’s royalties by one certain company.


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[TheKrell]

I don’t like the hammerlock on HD radio and it’s royalties by one certain company.

I don't either, but the royalties were already paid whether you use the HD part or not.

 

[navychop]

So true.

But there are better systems out there. We should not bind the country to benefit one company.


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[TheKrell]

But there are better systems out there. We should not bind the country to benefit one company.

Do you recommend government regulation to fix this sorry situation?

 

[navychop]

I think we should have a rep at the ISO or whatever world standards body is reviewing the matter. And whatever worldwide standard is selected, if there ever is one, mandate it.

Certainly an area for government regulation.

I’ll never live to see it.


On a related note, I understand a fully digital FM ( or AM?) signal will not save as much bandwidth as the video (TV) digital conversion did.


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[harshness]

Do you recommend government regulation to fix this sorry situation?

The non-committal attitude towards ATSC 3.0 makes it clear that the powers that be have no desire to involve themselves in adoption of new standards.

There's also the issue that the US radio band layout is different from that of many other countries so what works here may not work there and vice versa.

 

[Mister B]

I was eager to try HD radio so bought one of the few relatively inexpensive models in the Insignia "table top" radio from Bestbuy. The sound quality was what one would expect from about 1 inch speakers but I was more interested in the alternate music formats anyways. Here in El Paso, the only HD stations not available on regular FM were an alternate Classic Rock station from the Rock station and Oldie Country from the Country station. Across in Juarez there were about 5 additional stations with one playing European Dance Music and another Alternative Rock in English. The problem with the Mexican stations were that they do not bother to display any song title or artist information and I can not catch much of what they say.
The problem with the radio was that although it came with an AC adapter, I wanted to use it as a portable and it ate through batteries so frequently that in a few months something went wrong in the battery compartment and it would not stay on. I was moving about that time and just tossed it in with other stuff to go to my favorite charity thrift store.

 

[TheKrell]

I think we should have a rep at the ISO or whatever world standards body is reviewing the matter.

I think we are participants through ANSI.

 

[radio]

Interesting seeing this (rather old) thread get revived after so long....but, since it did.....

Late chiming in here, But confirming, HD is, indeed originally and still today, not "high definition" BY definition, but Hybrid digital. Why? Because tit uses part of the analog transmission to send you a digital audio and data signal. The digital signal rides along on, or alongside the analog.

As far as comparisons and comments so-far go, With regard to localism, the original agreement with FCC licensing was that satellite radio was NOT to carry localism. It was my understanding that this contributed to the yanking of some original XM rebroadcasts of "larger corporate" stations on it's channels.

As far as quality goes, on the AM side of HD, analog AM stereo far exceeds anything AM's hybrid digital can give. We can put out a wideband 10khz sound for you, where with HD, half or less than half is what you'll be hearing as the HD makes the AM station share the digital signal with the analog, thus cutting bandwidth to both from what analog can offer the listener.

It's slightly different with FM's HD. However, it should be noted that the AM side is already dead and buried for the most part, one reason being the hash noise that is generated on both sides of an AM HD signal. If a station was HD on our 1430, for instance, you'd be putting out digital noise on 1420 and 1440. FM does not have that issue, but looping back to quality, based on what my 2015 Jeep's satellite radio sounds like, AM Analog stereo, and HD FM are FAR ahead of what we're being served by the bandiwdth-misers at XM/Sirius.

Satellite today? Nothing like the quality XM had when it made it's debut back so many years ago. In my receiver, most of the music streams sound like mp3's with bad artifacts ringing. It's painful to listen to any "broadcast" in which quality is not a concern. We'r a 60-plus year old AM station shoving analog AM stereo into an antenna array designed in 1956, and our NIGHT AM picked up on an AM stereo tuner and sent down the web to listeners is better than what I hear on today's satellite radio. In the daytime we beat their quality hands-down! (via a more modern 1-tower system with newer tuning units installed.)

I agree with the consensus, HD is for content-craving individuals. It's also a way for owners to pay big bucks for a license to a possible competitor (who is an investor in Ibiquity) while single handedly cutting up the pie of available listeners in their coverage area even MORE and maybe losing some (listeners) from their mother-ship main channel on FM. When this is done, it can be dangerous. Advertising on the HD channels when translated to FM is usually less expensive than the main station, and advertisers like "cheap"...some jumping ship from the main signal which cuts income to the radio station's main flagship. There are no limitations I know of commercial sales on HD stations, at least ones masquerading as "real" FM's via translators. It's done frequently.

Radio station owners also have abused the loophole of taking an HD channel and rebroadcasting it on FM translators. Some avoid the ownership caps in markets that way, some just do it to sound like they own more stations. This is an issue that should have been disallowed from day one, and the FM band would be much less crowded, not to mention Ibiquity and manufacturers of HD radios may have sold more units if there wasn't a way to get around listening to the actual HD by station's owners putting HD onto FM translators in the first place.

 

[EarDemon]

All I know is what my ears tell me, and they tell me there is nothing special about HD radio. I never experienced it until 2014 when I bought my Navigator and it had HD radio built in. Sirius, XM and SiriusXM have been my sources of audio entertainment since 2002, but I did play around with HD radio when I first got my car.

Here’s what I noticed, I live in between two radio markets and when driving I’m often too far from the Rochester stations to get any HD signal at all, and just close enough to the Buffalo stations to have it constantly switch between analog and digital. HD radio does not sound better to me then traditional FM, it just sounds different. The subchannels often sound bit starved and a clean signal from an analog station sounds much better than a digital subchannel. Not sure how much this is due to my cars audio system as it’s the premium THX Certified sound system, not sure who it’s manufactured by but I’d guess it’s JBL since they used to be Ford’s choice for the high-end audio systems.

I haven’t even tuned to AM or FM radio in years. The last time I believe I listened to HD radio was when a buddy of mine and I went to the Smokey Mountains and he wanted to listen to the local shock jock morning show. I believe we lost the HD signal once we got 25-30 miles south of the city. The content on the subchannels had a lot to be desired. The local teeny bop station is owned by Entercomm which also owns the areas premier AM news and sports stations. So two of their subchannels are just simulcasts of the AM stations. Another station that seems to change formats every handful of years was broadcasting a subchannel playing their previous format. Nothing really that compelling to me. In the Buffalo market we have three major corporate broadcasters, Cumulus Media, Entercomm Communications and whatever Infinity Broadcasting eventually became. Entercomm is the only one to use subchannels. The only other .1 worthy of mentioning is from our 110K watt class B superpower independent Christian station.

 

[harshness]

As far as quality goes, on the AM side of HD, analog AM stereo far exceeds anything AM's hybrid digital can give. We can put out a wideband 10khz sound for you, where with HD, half or less than half is what you'll be hearing as the HD makes the AM station share the digital signal with the analog, thus cutting bandwidth to both from what analog can offer the listener.

This would be an argument if there were lots of AM HD radio stations to be received but since an overwhelming majority of HD stations are FM, your argument is searching for needles in a haystack. There's one AM HD station in my state according to hdradio.com.

It is a deadly game to argue analog bandwidth vs digital bandwidth based on raw bandwidth as digital bandwidth typically involves data compression that reduces the bandwidth requirements significantly.

 

[radio]

Deadly game? Oh, come on... It's a valid point I made...and it is, indeed. Apples to apples, It's what your ears HEAR that matters, and that depends on what the source operator does to maintain quality end to end.

Even on HD FM, if you don't maintain quality from the console to the transmission, you get crap.

HD AM could never do what Analog AM can, and AM HD was poorly conceived....so it is not a competitor in the public...but is worthy of mention for it's faults when stacked up against it's analog competitor on AM STEREO which, properly broadcast is far superior to what is on satellite radio as of this writing. . Meanwhile, HD FM remains superior to satellite only because the satellite delivery platform is throttling the quality of the originating material as well as running it through the thinnest pipeline they can to get it to the listener. In my 2015 Jeep, Sirius/XM sounds like a 6th grader's traded mp3 from about a decade ago...I do, however understand various radios have varying levels of rendition of the supplied digital satellite stream, some better than others. A stream of full 10khz of AM analog stereo encoded to either 48k or 128k far surpasses anything satellite is serving up on it's current platforms.

While HD, however is still not a viable medium for the masses, (only for a minority of listeners) and certainly not any better quality than standard FM. It's viability is not the discussion. so.....I stand by my earlier thoughts...and we're back to the issue: Given a choice of satellite or HD (FM, since the Op didn't specify) I'd take the HD any day...ONLY if it's broadcast by an operator that cares about their end to end audio, and not by an operator trying to cash in on the presence of the ever-misconstrued term "HD" when referring to radio broadcasting.