HD Radio on the Offense
HD Radio promises clarity and diversity. What it delivers is a whole different story.
By David Downs
Driving across the Bay Area every day, you can't help but hear the great news: HD Radio has arrived! There are now secret stations hiding between the stations you can hear. All you have to do is go out and buy a new HD Radio and you'll hear your old stations in crystal-clear digital, plus secret ones that you've never even heard before. All with no subscription!
But after an investigation of HD Radio units, the stations playing HD, and the company that owns the technology; and some interviews with the wonks in DC, it looks like HD Radio is a high-level corporate scam, a huge carny shill. Do not tune in until your unit comes standard on that used Honda Civic you buy in 2015.
Between the high prices, poor listening options, homogenized content, and a decade and a half of FCC dealings that went into this monopoly, critics are calling the move to digital radio a "catastrophe" and a "complete giveaway" to behemoths such as CBS. Moreover, HD is pretty much a done deal.
Let's start at Emeryville's Circuit City, where sales rep Joel shows the one HD Radio model in stock. This $200 beauty should net you 22 Bay Area stations broadcasting their regular feeds with a clearer digital signal hitchhiking on it. It also promises to decode fifteen of their all-digital cousins.
Problem is, when you hit "seek" on the JVC unit, the HD tuner cycles and cycles as if we're in the wilds of Idaho. Very impressive.
Joel will assure you that Circuit City merely needs a new antenna on its roof to pick up this digital signal, but somehow your regular car antenna will manage to pick up all 37 stations just fine. You're not so sure anymore.
KFOG program director Dave Benson says the digital footprint, or signal coverage, is indeed smaller than the analogue one, but because digital radio is so new, nobody knows by how much. Still, Benson can receive HD in his office, and he reports that 104.5 FM not only sounds cleaner, the new technology lets KFOG share its bandwidth with an all-digital HD2 signal that carries a second KFOG. What's on it? How about Dave Morey's 10@10 — 24/7.
This digital sidekick and eleven other Bay Area HD2 stations duplicate the existing airwave dross with formats like "Wild Hispanic," "'50s/'60s Oldies," and "KCBS News." They seem to be underfunded, unoriginal dumps of existing content from their analogue brethren, or consist of some playlist cut together by a decent DJ like Aaron Axelsen. Big whoop. That's not the real scam.
These local stations multicast using a technique known as In-Band On-Channel broadcasting, whose patents are held by a fifteen-year-old private corporation called iBiquity. CEO Bob Struble says iBiquity arose from next-gen radio research at corporations such as Lucent. These big boys figured out how to squeeze four channels into each existing one, and have poured more than $200 million into controlling them all with help from the FCC. The esteemed commissioners responded by granting iBiquity exclusive rights to digital radio.
Struble says nobody owns the rights to analogue radio, but everyone who wants to broadcast in digital or make a receiver has to pay iBiquity. Fees start at $10,000 per new digital channel. "It's a new phenomenon in consumer electronics," he says. "There's aspects of HDTV that are proprietary; the MP3 format is owned by one company. The DVD technology is owned by a consortium." Struble thinks it's a fair system: "We have to license to anybody on a fair, nondiscriminatory basis. You, David, are going to get the same terms Sony did."
Great. But here's the catch: All the major radio players, such as Clear Channel Communications, are iBiquity investors. Which means Clear Channel is paying itself for the right to broadcast, and every mom-and-pop station that wants to go digital also has pay the big boys. Nice setup!
IBiquity's monopoly on this closed-source system is a catastrophe, says Michael Bracy, a lobbyist for the Future of Music Coalition, whose goal is diversity on the airwaves and higher pay for artists. "It potentially is a great thing, but it feels like the government really botched this," he says.
The new technology, he says, has opened up more real estate on the spectrum, but the same land barons are homesteading it all. "The first question is, 'Who gets to control these streams?'" he asks. "Is this an antidote to consolidation or is it a complete giveaway to radio chains? It looks like it's a complete giveaway."
Radio spectrum analyst JH Snider is research director for the Wireless Future Program of the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan DC think tank. He affirms that a public broadcasting license is virtually a license to print money, and the FCC's fourfold expansion of Big Radio's mints offers no public payback. "There's nothing special about the technology except that the broadcasters control it and basically they took technology that others invented," Snider says. "They should've opened it up to competition."
FCC sources claim the path to digital audio broadcasting has been open and inclusive. The public can access records going back to 1999, and read voluminous comments. "This was the most thoroughly tested system in broadcast history," Struble says.
Snider, however, says the whole way the United States doles out the spectrum favors broadcasters over common sense. "Just look at free satellite radio," he says. "North America is the only continent on Earth besides Antarctica that doesn't have free satellite radio stations. That's the power of the provincial US broadcaster."
The deal isn't closed yet. The five-member, Republican-led FCC still has the power to write some local obligations into Big Radio's digital expansion. The commission has yet to authorize blanket approval that would let any station deploy high-definition radio at will. The public, Bracy suggests, might ask the FCC to ensure one community channel for every three the bigwigs get. But somehow the public-interest groups are totally asleep at the wheel. "Nobody understands spectrum," Snider notes.
Furthermore, FCC sources say the commission could vote on blanket authorization at any time without informing the public.
Welcome to New Radio, boys and girls. It stinks just like Old Radio, except the smell comes in clearer and there's more of it. Stay tuned.
Comments (13)
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"Reduced quality concerns"
"Another such conflict arises from the extra free programs available today. iBiquity is seeking FCC approval for conditional access, that is, enabling the extra programs to be available only by paid subscription (on future models of HD Radio). NDS, a maker of digital media encryption technology, has a deal with iBiquity to provide HD Radio with an encrypted content-delivery system called RadioGuard. NDS claims that RadioGuard will provide additional revenue-generating possibilities. iBiquity has stated that RadioGuard will become a standard feature of the HD Radio system. These competing capabilities mean that purchasers of early models of HD Radio have no guarantees of continued broadcasts of either high-quality audio or extra channels. Audio quality will suffer as broadcasters decide to subdivide their streams into extra HD-2 and HD-3 channels. And if the extra channels become subscription channels, they will become invisible to older radios without RadioGuard (and to those unwilling to pay for them)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio
If iNiquity gets FCC approval for RadioGuard, those free channels may not be free for long - what a scam. This will obsolete all current HD radios without RadioGuard and require another round of HD radio purchases, just like what happened with HD radios without multicasting. This is the biggest scam ever fobbed onto broadcasters and consumers.
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dislike
I have an Alpine car radio with the HD Radio upgrade.
The good:
1) Sound quality is very good. AM sounds like FM. FM doesn't sound as good as CD, but still better than analog FM.
2) The "secret" stations, the subchannels of FM stations, have some good content
on them.
3) HD Radio is free of charge! After eating the cost of the radio up front, there's no subscription needed.
The bad:
1) HD Radio is too expensive! A radio that should have cost $25 ends up costing $200. I wish the FCC hadn't handed the HD Radio monopoly to a single company. There's no competition to drive down the price. One single company makes all HD Radio chipsets used in every radio.
2) The HD Radio signals aren't strong enough! They cut out too easily, even when the analog station comes in strongly. I read somewhere that the HD Radio digital signal is transmitted at a mere 1% of the wattage of the analog signal. It gets really annoying when you're right on the edge, and the radio keeps bouncing between digital and analog mode.
3) HD Radio requires 8 seconds to "lock on", before the analog signal becomes digital. That's about 7.5 seconds too long. It's annoying to tune to different HD Radio stations, because of the long waiting time. Also, it makes HD Radio useless for broadcasting a live event, because of the time lag.
4) AM doesn't have any "secret" stations. The AM subchannel is forced to carry a simulcast of the AM analog signal. There's no technical reason for this, since the AM analog signal isn't required anymore once the radio is able to "see" the digital signal. Most AM stations are talk, which doesn't sound any better in HD. The AM stations could have made decent money renting out their digital signal to somebody else, who could play music.
5) The HD Radio chipsets are poorly engineered. They use too much power. That's why you can't buy a battery-operated portable HD Radio. There's no alternative, because as mentioned earlier, only one company has the rights to make HD Radio chipsets.
The ugly:
Anyone remember AM Stereo of the 1970's? That's the path HD Radio is going down. A good idea, ruined by poor execution, and bad business decisions.
I just bought an HD radio for my car (with the current HD $50 rebate program) and I love it. Just like any form of programming, content is what matters, and I'm thrilled with KLLC's HD2 "chill" station. I've heard that some NPR stations use the second HD channel for the BBC, and I'd love to see that happen here. On a recent road trip to Portland, I found that the KCBS AM HD channel held solid until I was well past Fairfield. While the digital signals may not have the range of the analog, I feel I'm well served here in Albany, and I'm getting a Sony HD tuner for my home stereo as well. There may be some corporate shenanigans behind this, but as a listener I'm happy and would like to see more stations add HD content.
I'd love to have what HD promises, but does not deliver.
I can just barely hear an improvement in s/n when switching from analog to HD on my three favorite stations, all of which have state of the air high quality engineering. I don't hear any improvement in dynamic range or anything else.
There's only so may ways you can slice up bandwidth, and without new frequencies and more bandwidth, it's not possible to deliver better sound. Ya canna' change tha laws o' physics, as a better engineer than I once sagely said.
Now, that leaves one useful purpose; more low-bandwidth channels. Radio for the blind. Podcasting. Talk. News. However, none of those have been horribly profitable except for talk, and I am not convinced consumers will buy new gear just to hear more talk.
Result: I use my phone to play internet radio received over cellular data connections, fed through an iPod interface into my car-fi most of the time, with better bandwidth.
HD Radio loses. - K7AAY, PDX OR
I'd love to have what HD promises, but does not deliver.
I can just barely hear an improvement in s/n when switching from analog to HD on my three favorite stations, all of which have state of the air high quality engineering. I don't hear any improvement in dynamic range or anything else.
There's only so may ways you can slice up bandwidth, and without new frequencies and more bandwidth, it's not possible to deliver better sound. Ya canna' change tha laws o' physics, as a better engineer than I once sagely said.
Now, that leaves one useful purpose; more low-bandwidth channels. Radio for the blind. Podcasting. Talk. News. However, none of those have been horribly profitable except for talk, and I am not convinced consumers will buy new gear just to hear more talk.
Result: I use my phone to play internet radio received over cellular data connections, fed through an iPod interface into my car-fi most of the time, with better bandwidth.
HD Radio loses. - K7AAY, PDX OR
This smells a lot like AM stereo did. Nobody cared then. nor will the care now.
Ask anyone under the age of 30 what their favorite radio station is and they will look at you like you are out of your mind. Why? They don't listen to the radio, More and more people every day are tuning out. Why listen to music someone else plays, or shows at a required time? Now you don't have to. You can have a much bigger library of music right in your pocket. You can now play what you want when you want commercial, format, and static free. Even most talk shows can be had via podacst.....again you can listen on your time commercial and static free..
The radio broadcasters are ruining scared and with good reason. An AM/FM radio is starting to look more and more like an 8-track player... obsolete and you have to wait for what you want to hear.
The broadcasters are looking for people to buy new expensive equipment for something that less people want to listen to than ever before. Bad idea.
Where does shortwave radio come in all this? If it's going to survive as the only real radio out there, progressives better get some space between the, eh, zealously religious. Reach me at: http://melanconent.com/contact People Who Give a Damn building the infrastructure of a network for everyone http://pwgd.org/ Agaric Design Collective Open Source Web Development http://AgaricDesign.com
"RW Opinion: Rethinking AM’s future" "Only 175 or so AM stations have even licensed AM-HD. For a number of reasons, quite a few have tried it and taken it off the air, or so the anecdotal evidence suggests. Ibiquity no longer reports in its public summaries whether a station is on the air... Making AM-HD work well as a long-term investment is seen as an expensive and risky challenge for most stations and their owners. With the bulk of successful AMs airing news, talk and sports, the improved fidelity advantage of HD and stereo seem only marginally attractive. There is the significant downside of potential new interference to some of their own AM analog listeners as well as listeners of adjacent-channel stations. And of course we still have no nighttime authority for AM-HD." http://www.rwonline.com/pages/s.0044/t.557.html The HD Radio Alliance's 50KW-owned clear channel stations cause so much adjacent-channel interference, especially on AM, that AM-HD is not authorized for nighttime use, and blocks out smaller stations. The FCC is probably going to authorize AM-HD on March 22nd - so much for the AM band.
IBOC or Iblock as it should more properly be called is an especially odious malady that may also be inflicted on both night AM and FM radio stations, it blanks out stations on both sides of it's center frequency. Take WOR AM 710 for example, tune it on during the day time on 710 AM, then try 720, and now try 700 AM. What do you hear? A bunch of hissing white noise covering the two adjacent channels. Can you imagine what this is going to do to night time reception when these signals can go 100's sometimes 1000's of miles and any car radio can pick this up? I live in Ma. where WBZ 1030 hisses up 1020 and 1040. Maybe I like to listen to KDKA which comes in pretty well here at night, what am I going to do if the paid and bought FCC decides to allow night time Iblock? I will just simply have to shut up and not listen to KDKA anymore. Now what if WBZ and KDKA both decide to use Iblock and are able to use it at night? You will hear complete noise in NYC probably from 1010 to 1040 and will hear neither station. Why are we going to be subjected to this mess? Why don't we the consumer have any say in this looming debacle? FM Iblock stations are lucky to be decoded 10 miles from a transmitter unless the radio has a special outside antenna, then maybe twice the range, wow! Hey, maybe Iblock will bring back the 50's when every house had a huge antenna on top. Are we going backwards or forwards? This supposed technology is doomed before it begins, it will certainly destroy both FM and AM radio. Are we the people going to let a tiny group of millionaires try to monopolize and soon destroy radio as we know it? It is up to us, call or write the FCC and let them know what you think, yes this new Rube Goldberg scheme stinks and in more ways than one.
I have been a broadcast engineer for over 30 years. This system is probably the biggest waste of time and resources that has ever been fobbed off onto the public. The coverage is less than half of a good analog signal, and is interfered with by such things as the vehicle ignition and even some traffic lights. Technically it's incredibly flawed. The digital signal is put on the two adjacent frequencies, so it will interfere with nearby stations, and interfere with them. On AM, distant skywave will skip in and wreak havoc. Effective coverage areas on both AM and FM will shrink considerably, even on the existing analog signals. I have bought a couple of HD Radios specifically to see how well it works, and it simply doesn't. Should this be authorized by the FCC, and a significant number of stations implement it, the radio bands will simply be awash with digital hiss grinding against itself. It's really a shame. They dropped the ball big-time with this, and I hope the public isn't too wounded by it that they simply give up on radio. For digital radio to be implemented correctly, it really needs it's own band. Trying to squeeze such incompatible technology together is a serious mistake.
Best article yet. At last, the truth about this BigKorpseorate scam gets out. HD cheerleaders make one false claim after another. CD quality audio? More like 'seedy'. Range? Short. What's the real advantage of HD radio? None for us. Everything for the handful of big monopoly broadcasters pimping it. It jams. It blocks reception of every station but the Big Boyz. It makes all your radios obsolete. Want radio? Then you must buy new HD radio from their Company Store. The FCC votes on this grift next Thursday, 22 March, 2007. E-mail them at www.fcc.gov. Call them. Call your reps. There is still time to stop the theft of our airwaves. Our influence counts. Let's use it. Dr. Paul Vincent Zecchino Manasota Key, Florida 16 March, 2007
HD Radio is a scheme by BigKorpseorate monopoly broadcasters to take over public airwaves. HD cheerleaders make one false claim after another. They claim HD has CD quality audio. Actual users call it 'seedy quality'. HD brings more stations via 'streams'. But 'streams' are as this article states, dumps. Almost everyone who buys an HD radio returns it. Why on earth approve this destruction? The HD gang hasn't told us about this scam because they want it to be a done deal with the FCC before they spring the trap. You see, what HD radio does best is jam. HD's digital noise denies you the right to hear stations of your choice. HD radio renders every radio you own obsolete - worthless. That's right. They just stole your property. Want radio? Then you must buy HD radio. That's what this grift is about. It's the return of the Company Store. Want to stop it? The FCC votes on this absurdity next Thursday, 22 March, 2007. E-mail them at www.fcc.gov. Call them. Call your representatives. Tell them radiowaves belong to us - not a handful of corporate thugs who coerced the FCC into stupidity. Tell the FCC it's time they took a stand and stopped this destruction of public airwaves. Your influence counts. Use it. Dr. Paul Vincent Zecchino Manasota Key, Florida 16 March, 2007
"Sirius, XM, and HD: Consumer interest reality check" (Alexaholic) "While interest in satellite radio is diminishing, interest in HD shows no signs of a pulse." http://www.hear2.com/2007/02/sirius_xm_and_h.html "What kind of digital radio are listeners searching for?" http://www.hear2.com/2006/10/what_kind_of_di.html Luckily, consumers are not interested in the huge scam ! Great article - best that I have seen !
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