On Sat, 16 May 2009 20:57:56 -0700, David Eduardo wrote:



[snip]

I said previously that the current economy was likely going to set HD
back enough so that it would lose its window of opportunity. There is a
contraction in the economy at all level; consumers will not buy new home
radios nor will they buy new cars with HD. By the time the economy
recovers, we will be that much closer to WiMax and other delivery
systems.

HD got the development money first. That should be an advantage.


There are plenty of things on the "old" agenda that are not going to
happen due to the economy, and HD is just one of them.


If HD radio actually served a mass market, then, by now, it would be
sufficiently established that the poor economy would only be delaying HD
radio's potential competitors.



We have done the same comparisons ourselvs, so no thanks. The issue is
that a station music do separate processing for the digital stream to
the HD gear, or there will be no gain and considerable destruction of
the digital audio. When done right by good engineers, there is a
considerable difference that anyone can hear. First in noticability is
that since the noise floor is much lower, more dynamic range can be
preserved. Second, the nasty 75 us FM analog preemphasis curve does not
apply to digital, so there is another area of gain.

How many current stations even approach the limits of dynamic range of
FM? Here, there were a couple of classical stations, but one has been
gone for a few years.



Since the investments are already made, and nearly all viable Top 100
market FMs have HD, they will stay in place, and we will se what the end
game is. AM, as a band, is dead, so, short of having AM radios spit out
gold coins, nothing is going to help AM stations...

Since this is a DXer's forum, shouldn't HD radio discussions be taken to
mean AM IBOC by default, rather than FM?

And how about the sound of HD AM?

Frank Dresser