Wednesday, March 01, 2006
HD Radio-MORE FALSE ADVERTISING?
"The truth is that most, if not all, digital FM broadcasts will utilize bitrates of around 48kbps - fine for casual in-car listening, but hardly high-fidelity in the true sense of the phrase."
"The 'HD' label implies that — as with HDTV — there is a significant increase in quality, as compared to analog. This is simply not the case."
"'HD Radio' is actually a misnomer. The digital signal may be quieter, in terms of background noise and interference, than an analog FM signal — particularly under marginal reception conditions — but it is NOT higher fidelity. It contains built-in distortion and encoding artifacts that are not present in a good analog FM signal, especially at the lower bitrates (48kbps or even less) that will be used by almost all digital FM broadcasts in order to accomodate 'multicasting' (multiple channels per station) — which is very much part of the game plan for all of the big FM chains."
Here is the link to the story (see bottom of page):
http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/011806/index.asp
"The 'HD' label implies that — as with HDTV — there is a significant increase in quality, as compared to analog. This is simply not the case."
"'HD Radio' is actually a misnomer. The digital signal may be quieter, in terms of background noise and interference, than an analog FM signal — particularly under marginal reception conditions — but it is NOT higher fidelity. It contains built-in distortion and encoding artifacts that are not present in a good analog FM signal, especially at the lower bitrates (48kbps or even less) that will be used by almost all digital FM broadcasts in order to accomodate 'multicasting' (multiple channels per station) — which is very much part of the game plan for all of the big FM chains."
Here is the link to the story (see bottom of page):
http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/011806/index.asp
