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The Wonders of HD Radio.
Rfburns wrote:
Just finished having a little chat with a general manager for several radio stations here in West Virginia. A few of them are transmitting HD. This poor fellow is still under the illusion that HD radio is set to take off like a rocket. He sites Ford's decision to make HD radio an option for '08 and thinks that other auto manufacturers are on the verge of announcing their introduction of HD radio as an option. I informed him that the local Best Buy has had the same two RCA HD-100 radios on the self for several months with no takers and that the local Ford deal was unaware of the HD radio option. How detached can these people be? It's no wonder listeners are dropping like flies. The interesting thing about all this is that one of the HD FM stations has a very annoying buzz on the analog transmission side that I suspect is being cuased by poor implementation of the Hybrid Digital equipment and it's been there for months. This poor fellow informed me that it's a defective microphone in one of the studios. Funny thing, it occurrs during music and remote network news. Who does he think he's fooling. It's obvious to me that he nor anyone else is listening close enought to discover the wonders of HD radio. jw Typical Radio response: Deny, Deny, Deny. But then, in all fairness, that's a typical response throughout the culture, these days. They're still running heavy HD promos here in the Windy. What's not happening is promotion based on content. They're selling all the things that are secondary to listeners: Audio quality, digital clarity. And some listeners have noted that in higher noise listening environments, the HD stream is definitely not as easily appreciated as the more highly processes analog stream. Further, after decades of highly processed, loudness war audio, many listeners are finding the less processed sound of the HD stream less appealing. And finally, as you've suggested, HD isn't being uniformly well implemented. Resulting in poor first time listener experiences. It's very hard to come back from that kind of first contact deficit. And the one thing that's rarely discussed, is that the public, in the main, doesn't really understand the concept of audio quality on the same level as the engineers who built this stuff. Look at the number of half-baked, 'drug-store electronics' stereo systems being sold today. Less than $100, but all have 5 band graphic equalizers on the panel. And speakers that would make the engineers at Ten-Tec laugh. Talking 'audio quality' to owners of such hardware creates an entirely different expectation of performance than it does to guys like me with more invested in the speakers in his living room than he does the SUV in the garage. Selling audio quality is, at best, a hit or miss proposition...because so much of the perception depends on experience exposure, and quite frankly the interest in knowing what sounds good, or bad, and why. Most users of radio simply don't know. Nor do they care to do the math to find out. Instead, HD should be selling content. But they can't, because the thrust of the effort is in producing the baseband audio in "HD Quality" on the digital stream. Supplementary content is spotty at best. And usually poor, because there is little or no budget to support it. Advertising on the HD supplementary streams is insufficient, at this stage to make the supplementary audio streams self supporting. So, at best, the efforts that I've heard, are half-assed. Here in Chicago, they're never mentioned. To date, no one but Roe Conn on WLS has mentioned that WLS is carried on the WZZN secondary HD stream. For guys up here who have trouble receiving WLS AM due to the noise, having WLS on an HD stream of a station we CAN receive is a big plus. WZZN hasn't mentioned it once. This is just one example. There are dozens of others representing a sizable missed opportunity to sell this system on content...which is where listening is rooted. Until stations begin to sell based on CONTENT, most of HD's marketing efforts are self-defeating. There are signs that HD isn't entirely dead. And getting it in the hands of listeners in the car will certainly help. Controlled environment listening, newfangled-ness...all will help secure exposure. But if it doesn't work as expected...it can work as promised, but the EXPECTATION is often different, even when the promise is clearly defined...if it doesn't work as expected, HD will have signed it's own death certificate. The first stumbling attempts to get HD in the ears of the public were staggeringly disappointing. And those were the Innovators and Early Adoptors. Burn them once and they move on. And without them, and their buzz....Belongers and Late Adoptors will not make the move. As presented, so far, HD is a solution in search of a problem. And short of an FCC mandate, there's not a lot of reason to suggest that the rate of uptake will improve. |
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