blitz wrote in message ...
And you're clearly an industry shill if you can't admit the sound
doesn't faithfully reproduce the original.

No, far from it. I just am tired of all the DX geeks living in the
momma's
basement who complain that they can't DX AM and are ready to proclaim HD a
failure.

Stick to the point. HD tuners do not faithfully reproduce the original
sound. Prove it for yourself. Put a decent non-HD tuner next to an HD
unit (using the same decent antenna, amp, and speakers) and do an
honest comparison.

Analog isn't going away, so that will be available for a long time ot
come...HD simply adds more funcitonality.

I won't argue either point - and haven't.


AM analog does suffer due to IBOC. And not just the bleedover of the
sidebands into first and second adjacent channels, which is significant. It
suffers additionally on the stations that are using IBOC because the
stations have had to back the bandwidth of the analog signal down to the
point it's barely better than a telephone line (about 4 KHz audio spectrum).
It's the stations' own fault that AM fidelity has gone to hell, and the
receiver manufacturing industry has only helped the decline by building
cheaper adn cheaper crap radios.

In the 70's, the FCC allowed an increase in bandwidth of the standard AM
signal in preparation for the coming of AM Stereo. At that time, you
absolutely could not tell a local AM signal from an FM signal on any decent
tuner (though it was getting hard to find a decent tuner!!).

When AM stereo came to Portland, I listened exclusively to AMS stations
(primarily KGW) because I didn't have to deal with the multipath and signal
dropouts of the FM stations around town, especially the downtown area, in
which FM is virtually unusable. KGW's AMS signal was noiseless, flawless,
and every bit as good as a solid FM signal.