[BC] Can we now have a serious discussion about audio quality??

[VideoPaul@aol.com]

In a message dated 12/23/2005 2:49:45 P.M. Central Standard Time, 
lists at loudandclean.com writes:
   Performance in full digital is the real "pig in a poke" about
HD as developed by Ibiquity.  As I read their white papers,
when we (the industry) turn the analog off, the _existing_ IBAC
carriers get turned up, and we get to add additional IBOC
carriers where the analog was, but at a lower level than the
IBAC carrier groups.

   This means that the receivers must be able to receive
'interleaved' carrier groups, where a lower-first-adjacent
interferer will have it's high-level upper IBAC carrier group
within the area where the desired station's low-level IBOC
carriers will be.

This is all well and good, but I do not think that the end of analog 
broadcasting is nearly as close at hand as Ibiquity thinks it is, and 
NO ONE has addressed the fact that IBOC as currently presented has 
unacceptably LOW audio quality.  The MPEG-like artifacts are 
everywhere in the high end.  Multicasting means taking data away form 
the main channel and making it sound even worse.

I have gotten several people from my company in the truck and sat 
them down to listen to IBOC.  Without giving any opinion one way or 
the other, I put on a local station, which of course will first come 
up as analog.  Then they hear the switch to the digital and they all 
asked the same question.  A typical conversation:

"What happened to the audio??"
You're hearing the digital audio signal now.
"That's the digital?"
Yessir.
"It sounds worse!  Let me hear the analog again"
(switching around it made and the A/B comparison is given)
"The digital sounds worse.  Why would we spend all that money to put 
this on the air?"

I save face by telling them that this is a new technology and it 
should get a lot better, but no one seems to be actively addressing 
the problems with the digital audio.  Exactly WHY can't we process it 
aggressively?  If the data rate is the issue, shouldn't we be 
pressing Ibiquity for a higher data rate, at least working towards 
more audio data once analog goes away?

There are a couple of schemes out there for a digital subcarrier that 
rides the main analog signal and isn't 20dB down, and doesn't have 
the audio problems that the IBOC does.  But, they don't allow for 
multicasting and don't allow a lot of room to SELL DATA so they are 
likely to get fought tooth and nail.

To those companies that are heavily invested in playing MP3s on the 
air (you know who you are), is there any movement to addressing the 
destructive nature of cascading codecs?  Taking something that has 
been transcoded to and from MP3 and then crammed into the even 
smaller IBOC data bucket starts to exhibit some very annoying artifacts.

Before we go too far down this road, is it unreasonable to ask for 
better data and coverage out to our protected contours?  More to the 
point, we as terrestrial broadcasters can offer something that the 
satellite boys cannot:  DECENT UNCOMPRESSED AUDIO!  XM and Sirius 
will always have to hyper-compress their audio data.  Do we care 
about our listeners so little that we are willing to subject them to 
artifact filled music with that "springy" sound in the high end??  We 
beg them to not go to satellite or iPods and then give them worse 
audio to listen to.

When I had the opportunity to question this at he B-E HD Radio 
seminar at NAB, I heard all about the wonderful data services they 
want to sell.  I asked Jeff Detweiler directly if I had this 
straight...that with the 300kB of data they will be able to pass in 
the utopian world where analog radio had been killed off, that they 
will be dedicating LESS THAN A THIRD of that data to the analog audio 
program.  He said that my understanding was correct.  I questioned 
whether or not it made sense to ANYONE that we in radio, who are 
supposedly in the business of getting decent quality audio from here 
to there, weren't even committing HALF of the eventual bandwidth 
to--as silly as it seems--AUDIO!  I was told that there were so many 
opportunities to sell data that this wasn't considered to be an real concern.

I then asked the real land mine question:  If there might be any way 
for some poor, misguided broadcaster whose understanding of the 
industry were so hopelessly out of whack that he wanted to actually 
deliver BETTER audio to his audience would be able to dedicate more 
than the 96k of audio that Ibiquity felt was adequate.  The entire 
room heard the answer:  No, that was not being worked on in any way.

Okay, rant mode off.  Flame away, I got big shoulders.

--Paul Strater