[BC] Charlie on the MTA - HD Radio On the Road

[Rich Wood]

In an earlier message I promised to post my reactions to HD Radio on 
a trip from Western MA to Boston and back. This is the text of a 
message responding to someone commenting on how stations are 
currently promoting the system on the air, leading listeners to 
believe they were actually listening to HD Radio.

In order to keep this reasonably fair, iBiquity has no say in how a 
station promotes. You can't blame them for dumb radio people. I went 
to Boston today and heard WSRS, Worcester, MA  promoting HD as if 
everyone already had one. In this case, their analog sounded much 
better than their HD. Someone turned down the bass and cranked up the 
highs. God, it was shrill.

The winner of the most improved sound award for the day goes to 
WBZ-HD. The news voices were about as natural as I've ever heard on 
AM. Agency spots were tough to listen to because of their usual high 
end EQ. They made for some bad artifacts. Locally produced spots 
sounded good. It seems when you push AM HD the artifacts get you by the throat.

WTAG, Worcester, MA sounded reasonably good with a very gravelly 
voiced garden guy. I heard more gravel in AM HD than in analog. 
However, the spots were riddled with artifacts, especially the ones 
with high density content. Pushing too hard, I think.

My experience with HD so far tells me that isn't going to happen any 
time soon. I did detect a couple of stations processing separately. 
One sounded very good and the other was dead and muddy in HD and 
bright and punchy in analog. My testing was done from RT 128 near the 
Needham towers up to Lexington, down RT 2 and West on the Mass 
Turnpike. Much of it within sight of the Prudential Tower.

WBOS had good processing on both. The HD was slightly lower in level 
but nice and clean. The FM winner on this trip.

WJMN had a very erratic secondary programming the same as the main. Very weak.

WILD had an erratic HD signal

WKLB had no difference.

WTKK. All talk. No difference.

WZLX had good analog and extremely muddy HD (the worst audio quality 
I've heard yet in HD). Very close to WSRS in the other direction.

WMJX had no apparent difference.

WBUR had no difference. They're NPR and have great audio everywhere.

WMKK had separate processing. Not impressive.

The system in my car is very high quality. I have the impression many 
of these stations that are separately processed were done to sound 
good in the Manager's car. Most average sound systems in cars sound 
muddy. WSRS must have had the Manager in the car directing the 
engineer to stop when it sounded good. Very little low end and the 
high end cranked high. To make it worse, the station has jingles of 
all female voices. I have to check the windows to see if any are 
cracked. My coffee mug is shattered. There's one HD station that 
really did jump out at me. It gave me a headache worse than the drive 
West at sunset.

If the FM people would learn how to process and the AM didn't crap 
all over its neighbors, we might have something here. Sadly, the most 
dramatic quality improvement was on AM where the biggest problems 
are. It's not FM but it sounds better than analog at 3KHz.

Rich


Rich Wood
Rich Wood Multimedia
Phone: 413-303-9084
FAX: 413-480-0010