D Peter Maus wrote:


And the final analogy would be that the elephant is only a tool.

No! The elephant is the audience. The sightless people use their
hands to examine the tail. Their hands are the tool; feeling the tail
only is their misuse of the tool.

The condition the tail and ply it with skin and hair treatments. All
the other blind people come over to feel the wonderful tail in envy.
But the elephant is dying -- it hasn't been fed.

Eventually the elephant dies and the blind caretakers will wonder what
happened. Likewise, eventually the house of cards that is radio today
will fall down, and all the "wise men" will wonder what the hell
happened.



You, like me, are one who is no longer being served. It happens. The
more desirable are younger, hipper, or less demanding in areas not
easily provided for. The emperor may be naked. But we, and a few like
us, are the only non nudists in the empire. The those who advise the
emperor only listen to the many who are also naked.

Some of those younger people will have ears, too, and they'll want to
listen to something besides hip-hop. When they hear live jazz, then
hear it on their "HD" radio, they will be disgusted.


And they were. Digital recordings by engineers recording with analog
mindsets. Too much equalization. Preemphasis. Compression.

Only some of them. I can think of notorious examples off the top of
my head.

But the pain was hearing the unfiltered aliasing above 22 kHz.
*Those* folks noticed.

Some CD's still suck. But
nothing sounds like those early discs.

So it will be with HD. If it lasts, it will evolve. Like the CD, it
will eventually be embraced as a fidelity medium.


No. I utterly disagree. Today I can hear the artifacts on a stream
from NPR. The technology isn't constrained by any format -- the
satellite service to feed the local stations is compressed, and they
chose to compress it too much, because whoever made that decision
couldn't tell or didn't care.

And *THAT* is how it will be with HD.

For the record, though, CD's were never intended to be high fidelity.

I disagree there, too. Wasn't the initial capacity of a CD set by the
head of Sony to correspond to the length of his favorite orchestral
piece?

Philips promoted them as mid-fi media. Of course Philips also intended
the cassetted to be a dictation only medium...so things don't always fly
as intended.

It wouldn't surprise me that Phillips and Sony were on different
pages, but that's too far a reach for me to believe. I remember how
everyone was talking about DAD's as they were called initially.
"We're gonna blow away metal tape," gloated one. With reason -- they
did. But all the publicity they sought was about the medium -- 100dB
dynamic range, infrasonic to 22 kHz, flat response.



This time, one won't need a golden ear to hear the artifacts. I
cringe on what comes out of my car radio from NPR when they have a
feed filled with artifacts. When you can hear it over the road noise
on a car radio... that's an accomplishment.


It's one of the reasons I listen to less radio, these days.



It won't just sound bad, it will be painful to listen to.


And it will improve.


Not enough. Receiver designers will struggle to deal with the limited
amount of information present in the heavily compressed,
low-sample-rate streams. They will make it sound better, but DAC/ADC
technology for sound reproduction is mature now. You can't recreate
the analog signal if the information isn't in the digital stream.



I don't care for it. But then, I don't do much listening, anymore,
either.


Bottom line. No matter what the advertisers are willing to pay,
there's no return if there are no listeners.


Reality: listeners lost will be replaced. Every assault to radio over
the last 75 years has resulted in a revolution of sorts. With new
listeners being replaced by the old.

You and I will be replaced.

We already have been.


By iPods and MP3 players. By software on a computer and 24/96 sound
cards. People will only flock to the radio after a disaster that
leaves them without internet service.


That I disagree with. The growth of podcasts, satellite radio, etc.,
will fill the void. For the longest time, I felt that radio would
endure, because of the low amount of infrastructure to keep it going.
I didn't count on the sheer stupidity of people behind radio.


We're not in disagreement here. There will be options to Radio. There
ARE options to Radio. My point was that for those who choose Radio,
there will be little option but to embrace HD. And those who choose
Radio will embrace it.


As to the sheer stupidity...I can tell you from my 4 decades + of
experience on the inside...that hasn't changed. It's always been stupid
on the inside.


That's true, but there was always someone to break the model. When
DJs were forced to use boring playlists after the Payola scandal,
Wolfman Jack did just fine with his border blaster clear up to L.A.
He also made a ton of money doing so.

Today... well, the model may not be broken. We'll see what the
classical and jazz stations do.



We're simply witnessing the death of radio.

Obituaries may be premature.


Time will tell. This message will last in archives that long, so
people like Edwardo can point and laugh in 10 years after radio grows
under his mercenary hand.

But my money is riding against it.


I'd hedge that bet, if I were you.


I've stated my position and have staked it out. See Brenda-Ann's post
in this thread for another dissenting opinion.

--
Eric F. Richards,
"It's the Din of iBiquity." -- Frank Dresser