HD radio – Page 9 – Engineering Radio

Ford begs Broadcasters: “Please install our wonderful HD Radio product.”

In an open letter to broadcasters, the entirety of which can be found here: Ford Exec Writes Open Letter to Broadcasters, Jim Buczkowski, whose official title seems to be “Henry Ford Technical Fellow and Director, Electrical and Electronic Systems Research and Innovation Ford Motor Company,” nearly begs broadcasters to install HD Radio technology at their radio stations.

One thing that seems to be missing from the open letter, is something mildly important called: Disclosure. According to iBiquity’s own website, Ford Motor Company is an investor in the technology. Other investors include:

Clear Channel
CBS Radio
Grotech Capital Group
J.P. Morgan Partners
New Venture Partners
FirstMark Capital
Harris
Texas Instruments
Visteon

Not an inclusive list by any means, but something to keep in mind when reading the letter or the latest iBiquity advertising in various trade magazines.

Back to the letter; the cliff notes version is this:

Through the use of HD Radio, AM/FM broadcasters can now embrace the digital age
Drivers now have many choices for in-car entertainment, including satellite radio (Sirius XM) and online services (Pandora, et.al) that offer “Crystal Clear” audio
Through Satellite radio, MP3 players, and IP streaming services, drivers now have extra features like Title, song, and artist; Song tagging; iTunes; album art, etc which they have become accustomed to
Installing HD Radio will be a big upgrade and make AM/FM stations on par with those “digital age” services

For the first part, there is not a single broadcaster in the country that is not already aware of HD Radio. Every radio station manager and owner knows that it exists, but most people in the general public do not. Radio stations are hesitant to install HD Radio equipment because it is expensive, has a questionable return on investment, is unimpressive, and technically dubious.

Making the comparison to Satellite Radio and or IP streaming services, which all require subscriptions or data plans, is a bit of a stretch. Someone who will pay a fee for in-car entertainment is usually a tech geek. As the subscription rates for Sirius XM show, that works out to about seven percent of the US population (~20 million subscribers/~300 million people). It is a bit harder to nail down those who listen to streaming products like Pandora, iHeartRadio, or other webstreams in their cars, but I’d estimate not more than ten percent do.

While 3G and 4G wireless services are great, it still does not have the same coverage as standard and FM broadcasting stations. The last time I tried to listen to Pandora in my vehicle, it kept dropping out and was not easy to deal with. With TuneIn radio, I had the same experience during urban, suburban, and rural driving. Thus, the “Crystal Clear” reception is also a bit of a misnomer.

Further, fooling around with iPods, iPhones, TuneIn, Pandora, etc while driving is not the best idea. Even on vehicles with built-in IP connectivity or satellite radio, looking for song titles and other information while driving is not recommended. Thus, the value-added services of HD Radio are of questionable at best in a moving vehicle.

I hate to keep beating a dead horse, but for as long as the iBiquity crew continues to spout disingenuous bull sh!t about their failed technology, I’ll keep posting about it.

More news talk migrates to the FM band

Once a bastion of the AM dial, News and or News/Talk format radio stations seem to be springing up on the FM band more and more often. The original premise for creating talk radio on the AM band was the lower bandwidth and reduced (or perception of reduced) fidelity when compared to the FM band lent itself to non-music programming. The reality is that receiver manufacturers never carried through on the NRSC-2 technical improvements, and AM receivers reproduced thin, low-quality audio. I digress, the story goes, the FM band was great for music and the AM band did well with information and talk.

Of course, there were always a few exceptions to those general rules, but for the most part, that pattern held true until about 2009 or 10. That is when AM station’s programming began to be simulcast again (everything old is new again) on FM stations and HD-2 subchannels. It would be interesting to examine why this is so and what it means to the radio business as a whole.

The general trend in the music industry has also been down. This is important because record labels and the radio business used to go hand in hand. Record labels had the job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Those groups or artists that had the talent would be given recording contracts and airplay. With exposure, they would become more known, sell more recordings, record more songs, etc until they peaked and began to decline. Radio stations prospered under this arrangement because they took on none of the risks while getting huge vast quantities of program material to playback, and charging advertising fees for spaces within that programming.

So far so good.

Then, two things happened:

The communications act of 1996
The Internet

The communications act of 1996 forever changed the way the radio business was run in this country. No longer were there several thousand individual stations, the most influential of which resided in markets #1 and #2. Instead, there were conglomerations of stations run out of Atlanta, Fort Worth, and a dozen or so other medium-sized cities. No longer were stations competing head to head and trying to be the best and serve their respective audiences; rather, station A was positioned against station B to erode some of its audience so that station C could get better national buys from big ad agencies. No longer would possible controversial artists like the Indigo Girls get airplay on some groups. Songs were sanitized against possible FCC indecency sanctions, morning shows became bland and safe, and radio on the whole became a lot less edgy as big corporate attorneys put the clamps on anything that would invite unwanted exposure.

The last great musical genre was the Grunge/Seattle Sound of the early 1990s. Those bands somehow mixed heavy metal, obscure mumbled lyrics, flannel shirts, and ripped jeans into something that the dissatisfied Gen Xers could understand and appreciate. By 1996, this had morphed into “Modern Rock,” and carried on for several years after that, to fade out in the early 00’s. Since that time, there have been no great musical innovations, at least on the creative side, other than the ubiquitous Apple computer and Pro Sound Tools software.

The internet greatly changed the way recording labels did business, mainly by eating into their bottom line. This had the effect of circling the wagons and throwing up a protective barrier against almost all innovations. The net result was fewer and fewer talented artists being able to record, which pushed those people into smaller, sometimes home-based recording studios. While those studios can put out good or sometimes even excellent material, often the recordings lack the professional touches that a highly trained recording engineer can add. Add to this the mass input of the internet and no longer are bands or artists pre-screened. Some may point to that as a good development with more variety available for the average person. Perhaps, but the average person does not have time to go through and find good music to download from the iTunes store. Thus, a break developed in the method of getting good, talented artists needed exposure. Youtube has become one of the places to find new music, but it is still a chore to wade through all the selections.

Thus, when FM HD-2 channels came into being, there was little new programming to be put into play. HD radio was left to broadcast existing material with reduced coverage and quality than that of analog FM. That trend continues today where now analog FM channels are being used to broadcast the news/talk programming that used to reign on AM.

What will happen next? If Tim Westergren has any say, the internet (namely Pandora) will take over and terrestrial radio will cease to exist. Current trends point solidly in that direction, although I think Tim is a little ahead of himself in his prediction.

News/Talk on the FM dial point not to an attempt to shift the wheezing, white, (C)onservative/(R)epublican programming to a younger demographic, who will, if I am any judge of history, remain unimpressed. No, rather, they are running out of other source material, simulcasting syndicated talk radio is cheap, lean, and a good way to make money without having to pay actual salaries.

Developments on the digital radio fronts

I am still in awe of iBiquity and I have to hand it to them for stick-to-it-liveness. The newest “fix” for their FM IBOC system, colloquially known as HD Radio™, is in contour on-channel repeaters. According to the article “Performance of FM HD boosters varies,” (Radio World online edition), the reason for such boosters is to “increase or fill in FM Digital footprint so that the digital coverage matches that of analog.”

The idea that IBOC is somehow an improvement over FM analog is becoming (or has become) untenable. In order to make the new system cover the same area with the same reliability as the old analog system, on-channel bandaids boosters are now needed. And what is with this extending coverage? How much more expensive will radio station owners have to deal with to make this scheme work? And I still don’t understand where the improvement over analog-only systems comes from.

As the article points out, however, all is not well in paradise; the IBOC booster signals interfere with analog signals close to the booster transmitter. This becomes problematic if the receiver is an analog-only device. As of this writing, most of the radios in this country do not have HD Radio™ capabilities. Thus, radios that are currently working perfectly well will be cut out and can become useless around these repeaters.

For your reading pleasure, the entire NAB report can be found here.

Try as they may, neither the NAB, iBiquity or Greater Media can supplant the laws of physics. Then there is that insanity definition floating around:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein

AM radio sucks! It’s horrible, sounds terrible and should be turned off!

This is a youtube video of a Police song from the 1980s received via skywave and recorded off-air on an AM radio.

Video Description:

The classic 1983 #1 smash hit, as received in analog C-Quam AM Stereo… in Japan… via nighttime skywave in the Tokyo area, roughly 500 miles away from Sapporo (ed: where the station is located). The audio quality is among the best I’ve ever heard from analog AM radio, thanks in large part to an excellent wideband receiver, very quiet band conditions, and the Orban Optimod-AM 9100 audio processor being used by HBC Radio to its maximum extent: 12.5 kHz audio bandwidth with stereo enhancement added (above and beyond the amount naturally provided by the matrix processing used by AM Stereo).

Absolute trash, I tell you. Just awful.

Of course, I know several FM stations around here that wished they sounded as good. Naturally, Japan, they have sought to minimize night-time interference problems by limiting the number of stations on the air and enforcing the rules and regulations in place to protect those stations on the air. They also seem to allow greater bandwidth, out to 12.5 KHz in spite of the narrower channel allocations (9 KHz in ITU regions I and III, vs 10 KHz here in the US, ITU region II). One other thing to note, there is no digital buzz saw occupying several channels of the broadcast spectrum. Keep in mind, this was received in Tokyo, likely a very high noise environment.

I was trying to find out the power level of the transmitter, the call sign is JOHR in Sapporo Japan, frequency is 1287 KHz. HBC is the Hokkaido Broadcasting Company, a privately held company. The state-run radio outlets in Japan are NHK, which has several radio and TV stations throughout the islands.

Anyway, AM is dead. Killed by the very owners of the broadcasting companies themselves with help from the NAB. They are the ones that petitioned the FCC to loosen up the allocations and allow more and more stations to be crammed into the band. That is old news. The new news is same forces that killed AM radio are diligently working their magic on the FM band as well. More stations, translators, digital IBOC nonsense that doesn’t work, more of everything. After all, more is better. Until it is not. Then it’s too late.