I’ve lost my HD Radio virginity.
I’m currently in North Carolina planning my move and rented a car – it’s a Toyota Corolla and I discovered today it has a digital HD radio. My hearing is bad enough at this point I’m not going to hear the subtleties of the high frequency response.
I couldn’t even figure out how to turn on the AM stations ;). So I put it on scan and arrived at what I think is an FM repeater – I didn’t look it up (yet) but it was a public radio station up near the top of the commercial band. It was playing a news/interview show and after a few minutes, I realized it was having a rhythmic dropout every 30 seconds or so where it would lose a couple words, which is problematic in an interview. I’m not quite sure what the issue is – my guess based on things I’ve read is I was in the fringe area, and it kept trying to switch from analog to digital, gets too many digital bit errors, then falls back to analog. It was a very unsatisfactory first experience.
The display seemed consistent with maybe being able to show me HD2/3/4 channels but didn’t show me any to the extent I looked,
Unless the FCC forces stations to use it – like adjusting ownership limits to only two FM station per licensee per market – forcing clear channel and Citadel to squeeze 5 or 6 licenses onto 2 frequencies, there is no motivation for the radio stations to put quality programs on the HD channels and no reason for consumers to want to buy an HD radio
after that review of HD radio, I’ll pass.
parrott
The HD AM is good, it sounds like FM and works well near close to the transmitters. In the outer suburbs, it switches back and worth with the underlying AM and it much more annoying than then the HD FM does.
In short, it is good if you are near the station you want to listen to, and unable to stream via the internet. I prefer internet streams.
My latest vehicle came with HD radio. I find it to be a mixed bag (it can be switched off completely, which is nice if you are listening to a fringe HD station). Stronger stations in my area usually have 2 or 3 different streams. I like having a few extra options — for example one of the ‘classic rock’ stations (which seems to play the same 50 songs repeatedly) has a 2nd stream that plays a much more eclectic mix with deeper album tracks, less talk, and fewer commercials. Of course, one wonders how many people are even listening to that 2nd stream! On the plus side, when an HD station is ‘locked in’ the sound quality is noticeably better than typical FM.