Radio Survivor

I spent the better part of this afternoon listening to my new HD Radio receiver, the Sony XDRF1 HD, tuning through the Chicago FM dial. There are 33 FM stations broadcasting HD in Chicago according to iBiquity, which owns the technology. I was able to tune in the HD signal for 19 of them. After several hours of listening I remain rather unimpressed by HD Radio.

My Sony XDRF1-HD tuner in its habitat.

Primary HD Channels

First off I will address the question of sound quality and fidelity. iBiquity claims “drastically improved sound quality” for HD Radio over its analog counterpart. I do not agree with this claim. Tuning between the analog and primary HD channel for each station I could perceive slight differences in sound quality between them. The biggest difference is the loss of background noise and hiss in the HD channel. Now, this is a very subtle difference, primarily perceptible during quiet music passages (which are rare on commercial FM) and voice breaks. This leads to the perception that there’s a bit more dynamic range on the HD channel, but it requires fairly high listening volume to clearly detect.

While I welcome the lower noise floor of HD, I otherwise don’t perceive any other significant increase in fidelity. On nearly every station I listened to the primary HD channel sounded nearly identical to the analog FM. Much of commercial FM is overcompressed, and I found that if a station’s analog signal was so overprocessed, so was the primary HD channel.

Sometimes I would lose the HD signal–since it’s broadcast at a much lower power level than the analog signal–and I never noticed just by listening. I had to look at the tuner’s display to know for sure. The shift between the HD and analog signals is pretty smooth sounding on the Sony tuner. I can tell when it happens, but it’s quite unobtrusive. If I’m not paying close attention to the radio it can happen without me noticing.

All of the 19 HD FM stations I received are stations that come in reasonably well in analog in my apartment in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the far north side of Chicago. The Sony XDRF1 turns out to have very good analog FM performance, bringing in the analog FM signals of these stations better than any other radio in my house except my Tivoli Model One, which is another room. Of the 10 stations where I couldn’t tune in an HD signal, 8 of them don’t come in clearly in my house in analog, either. For two stations my tuner did not indicate there was an HD signal present. More details listening notes by station are at the end of this post.

Secondary HD Channels

The other big advantage touted for HD Radio are the additional subchannels a station can have. Each HD station I listened to broadcast one or two additional channels. By and large the second HD channel had decent sound quality, but that nevertheless never matched the quality of the primary analog or HD channel. This should be expected because there is only so much digital bandwidth for each station to exploit, and the FCC requires that the primary HD channel–which must have the same programming as the analog signal–have the biggest share of the bandwidth.

The second HD channels typically sound like a good webcast station. That is, they sound like medium-quality MP3s with bitrates of 128 kbps or lower. I hear more compression and less dynamic range than the analog side, and some rolling off at the high end. Right now I’m listening to WXRT’s commercial-free HD channel 2 called “Channel X” and it’s pleasant to listen to, no more fatiguing than most web stations.
(more…)

iPod Nano

I probably don’t have to convince anyone reading Radio Survivor that radio rules. But just in case you need some persuading, I’d like to share a beautifully written love-letter to radio (written by a reviewer at Popular Mechanics of all places).

While checking out the new FM radio feature on the iPod Nano, former college radio DJ Seth Porges rediscovered what he once loved about radio. He writes that his listening habits expanded beyond his self-selected mp3s, broadening to include radio after a 10 year hiatus:

“…my once-rigid playlist of personal standards has suddenly been infiltrated by daily doses of NPR, college radio and the occasional classic rock riff. Yes, Apple has pushed me back into FM radio…

…there’s something inimitable and raw about radio. The way it fades into static as you drive out of a city or go too deep into a subway tunnel. The unyielding perkiness found in over-caffeinated morning-show hosts. The exceedingly obvious playlists compiled by classic rock stations.

The way college radio DJs (of whom I was once one) punctuate every other word with an ‘uhhh’ or ‘you know.’ This nostalgia is only bolstered by the fact that, for many of us, the radio was our first introduction to music.

For others, constructing a crystal radio kit was a DIY rite of passage. Sure, it’s middle-of-the-road stuff, but it’s also a distinct sort of fun that can’t be replicated by self-programmed playlists—or even the niche programming of satellite radio.”

He finishes the piece by postulating that the new Nano may even work to “introduce a new generation—and reintroduce an old one—to FM radio’s unique listening format.” And wouldn’t that be grand? Earlier this year I heard someone describe radio tuners for iPhones as being akin to transistor radios in terms of the way that they will help to transform radio listening. So, I do think he might be on to something here.

Problem solved! See update to this story.

Drat and double drat, I said, following the considerable amount of time it took to put Slacker radio’s app on my Blackberry Curve. It took about 15 minutes for the whole shebang to download and install, and then what? It played a tune for about a minute and crashed the whole darn operating system.

I patiently waited for my Blackberry to reboot, then tried again, thinking maybe that would fix the problem. The thing just bonked out again. Nuts.

It’s slow as poop too. Pandora is so much faster. But I’m trying the app again as I write this. Meanwhile I went over to Blackberry Cool today and it looks like I’m not the only one encountering this problem. Here’s what Ed had to report in his comments:

“Slow? Yes but also bugged up. It crashes my curve often. Still I think its great when it works. I never bothered with radio streams until slacker came out with their caching feature. I have deleted all my mp3 files from my media card to make room for stations.”

Ditto says Martin. “On a Curve the thing is almost unusable. The performance is dog slow and seems to tie up the whole device,” he notes. “I removed it figuring its probably designed for a Bold….”

Alas. But hmmm… When I fire the app up it says, “You’ll need an SD card to cache stations.” I think that might be the problem. More on this when I find out.

Meanwhile, Slacker whacked my system again. Doh!