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.

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.
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As I said in my introduction to our subjective and opinionated review of radio in the 2000s, I still think it was darn near impossible to predict how the medium of radio would end up at the beginning of 2010. Sure, the seeds for satellite radio, HD radio, low-power FM, internet radio and MP3s were already planted by the turn of the century. But home broadband–nevermind wireless or mobile–was a relatively exclusive luxury. MP3 players were lucky to sport enough memory to hold about a hundred minutes of music and weren’t integrated into cell phones. Satellites for Sirius and XM were launched, and HD Radio was being experimented with, but no stations were on the air. Clear Channel was flying high for more than $90 a share.

Anyone taking a broad view of the radio industry in 2000 could certainly see a lot of balls being thrust up into to the air, but it would have taken a psychic to predict where they would land. Nevertheless, for all of the churn we can say very safely that audio-focused content is alive and well.

It’s become clear to me that we Radio Survivors do consider radio to be greater than just the traditional electromagnetic broadcast medium. While we included the RF-based college radio, pubic radio, LPFM, HD Radio and satellite radio in our review, we also touched upon internet radio, Pandora and digital downloads. I believe we are first and foremost fans of terrestrial broadcast radio, but that does not cause us to ignore or discount new audio media. Nor does it cause it us to claim that they are not, in essence, radio services.

The homogenization and delocalization of the broadcast dial caused listeners to seek alternative places to hear more interesting and diverse content. At the same time the popularity of MP3 players and Pandora shows that people were also looking for customization.
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