Commander Col. Klink wrote:
http://reviews.cnet.com/2300-33_7-10...s=0&o=10001201

HD radio was supposed to be the next great thing in "free" radio,
offering clear, digital "CD quality sound" and more listening choices.

It did. It just did it when no one cared.

What killed HD radio was the application of digital satellite TV technology
to home audio. Someone realized that you could take a "song" and make
a computer file out of it that contained the same data as a CD image in
one tenth the space.

This lead to CD players that played home burnt CD-ROMs with these files on
them, which lead to devices with hard drives that fit in your pocket.

Eventually hard disks became replaced with solid state (semiconductor)
memory, resulting in small cheap players.

The result of having small cheap players and availablity of programing material
is that people choose what they listen to and when. Except for talk and news
radio it does not matter when you listen to a program, which is why they
still exist on radio. Neither requires the high fidelity, etc of HD radio.

Note that the MP3 or as the enhanced ones are called "MP4" players sold here
mostly have FM radios, but not AM. The rapid adoption of these players here
led Israel radio to move their foreign language news (English, Russian,
Arabic, Ethiopian, French, etc) to an FM only channel.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the
situation. i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in
the Wikipedia