In article ,
Bart Bailey wrote:

In
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net
posted on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:33:17 -0700, Telamon wrote: Begin

In article ,
Bart Bailey wrote:

Saw a fairly good blowout price on a tabletop Accurion, had only
recently heard of them, seems fairly decent quality, good
fit-'n-finish, made in China. AMBCB was somewhat of a disappointment
as there are only two stations I could get here in SoCal with the
inferior low-gain supplied indoor loop, KNX 1070 and KOGO 600 and
they both only showed their call sign and no program info, KNX did
say it was in Los Angeles. The FMBCB on the other hand was a
pleasant surprise with many stations offering sub channels and the
local Public Broadcasting station, KPBS 89.5, offering two. I know
there's been lots of talk about the bandwidth hogging aspect of
HD-AMBCB, maybe that could be dropped, but the digitally encoded
sub-channels of FMBCB don't seem to have any more negative effect
than the long standing presence of SCA services, which aren't even
noticed when tuning. I don't regret having a nice sounding tabletop
that I can control via an IR remote, even if all HD goes away.

The more sub channels offered the lower the bit rate for any one
channel. The low bit rate may work for voice but not music. I don't
even like it for voice myself.

Our local KPBS 89.5 has a total content of four services and I don't
find their digital programming unpleasantly restricted.
They have their primary analog audio plus two digital sub channels,
one classical and the other a streaming feed of Groove Salad,
neither of which have any noticeable audio deficiencies, and then
there's the SCA (radio reading service) which I remember to be slightly
inferior analog audio when music would play, but it was mostly talk.
I no longer have an SCA decoder nor does the new Accurian.

I've listened to recordings and HD has artifacts I don't like to listen
to so you are not going to convince me it's OK because it isn't. The
more sub-channels, the lower the bit rate on any one channel, and the
higher the compression. The higher rates of compression have more
artifacts. That's just the way it is with the numbers that support my
listening criteria.

Same goes for that DRM nonsense.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California