[BC] NO HD RADIO FOR CHRISTMAS

[Rich Wood]

------ At 02:08 AM 12/1/2005, Robert Orban wrote: -------

>It's by Ivan Berger, who is one of the great old-timers in the audio 
>press. I remember reading his stuff as long ago as the '60s. I don't 
>remember if he was writing for Audio, High Fidelity, or Hi Fi/Stereo 
>Review back then. Perhaps more than one?

I remember him well. I think he was with High Fidelity. It's hard to 
keep track. I know David was with High Fidelity, then unemployed when 
they went under and merged with Stereo Review. Then with Stereo 
Review and Sound and Vision.

Normally they rarely huff and puff about technology without including 
the negatives. The strange thing is that New Jersey is prime 
territory for NYC stations and has its own rating book that's taken 
from the New York diaries. If the range is 23 miles, stations will 
drop heavily in the ratings. I can get HD from WAMC, Albany at 90 
miles. The transmitter site is in Northwest MA.

I understand the Boston Acoustics receiver is officially out. It'll 
be interesting to see if it cures your reception problems. I've been 
waiting for my local NPR station to get their exciter back. It's on 
the air now. Unfortunately, I think the one format it won't treat 
well is Classical. The work I heard this morning was a violin 
concerto with many very high end violin passages. Instead of a 
beautiful, silky violin I heard a hard edge. I went back to analog 
and the silkyness returned. The secondary had NPR talk and the 
sibilants in the voices were painful, though the Engineer said he 
hasn't had time to adjust the secondary, so I'll wait. The stations 
is very well engineered.

>The article is called: "HD Radio: Ready for Prime Time?" on page 
>99-101 of the November issue. There is a fairly comprehensive list 
>of available or soon-to-be-available radios (there are 13 on the 
>list, including a Yamaha digital surround receiver that I don't 
>recall reading about previously). There is a list of markets with 
>the number of stations on-air. It says that 518 on now on-air and 
>931 are licensed.

931 isn't encouraging at this stage of the game. I'm sure many 
stations bought exciters at the fire sale price before it went up to 
$25,000, just in case. Couple that with few places to buy receivers 
and some new technology is likely to pass us by. We still have the 
issue of AM HD interference for which there may be no solution.

Rich