I’ve lost my HD Radio virginity.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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,<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading