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Old December 20th 03, 10:55 PM
Mark Roberts
 
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David Eduardo had written:

| We bought a dozen or so average consumer radios, from a walkman to a boom
| box to a clock radio, and whatever is in between. On every one, the music in
| analog sounds as good as it did before, and switching the IBOC on and off
| produced during several days of testing no significant differences on
| average radios.

Has anyone thought to test on car radios? It's my observation that
the average car radio on AM has more sensitivity and (sometimes) wider
bandwidth than the average home unit. That, to me, would seem to be
the acid test.

Most of the stuff you can get in a Target or Mall-Wart for home
use is pretty junky. A Zenith Circle-of-Sound clock radio from the
1970s will run circles around anything for home use today.
(I miss Zenith in a curious kind of way.) The best recent unit that
I have is a Cambridge Sound Works Model 88 from 2001. It seems fully
NSRC compliant. The two music stations on AM that I could stand to
listen to for extended periods, KFRC (oldies) and KMZT (classical)
sound reasonably good -- not quite FM, but better than almost any
AM. It's a little weak as far as sensitivity goes, though.

| The only thing that IBOC requires is a narrower analog bandwidth. The
| processing stays the same, and most radios sound identical as they have
| limited bandwidth to begin with.

But then there is the interference. Electrical interference on AM is
bad enough as it is.

--
"Right here in Minnesota!"
"Bullwinkle, that's Florida!"
"Well, if they're gonna keep adding states all the time, they
can't expect me to keep up!" -- Rocky & Bullwinkle, episode 5, 1960