Electronics → HD radio

Does anyone has any firsthand experience with HD radios?

I'm planning on replacing the radio in my car, and HD radio is one of the option I'm thinking about.

I looked up some radios on crutchfield, and the HD radios that would fit all have tuners with 9.3 dbf sensitivity while some of the non-HD radios are speced as low as 8 dbf. Of course I grew up with microvolt at some signal-to-noise ratio, so I find the simple dbf spec not very meaningful.

Is it worth to get a HD radio? I drive mostly in an urban areas with HD stations, though I occasionally go out to the boonies.

I have a Sony HDR-F1HD radio at my office in town and I love it. I had planned on putting a HD in my van but have never added it to my Alpine so I'm not sure how it would be driving around. It's possible you could drop signal from time to time due to buildings. Can't really answer any questions regarding range of reception as I've only used it in an urban setting basically LOS to the broadcast antenna. Your post makes me think though -- I may order the Alpine HD Radio Tuner Module Interface for my van.

If you are replacing the Radio, it is a good time to go HD. Make sure the radio does the rest of the things you want, and that you like how the controls work for the other things you do.

The other thing is to make sure the radio has a way to force analog-only reception. (Usually hidden menu, or hold your tongue with your left ear while pressing the down tuning arrow kind of thing.) This can help out when a station does not have HD and analog audio aligned, and you are blending back and forth due to multipath and other stuff.

dBf are able to be directly converted. Here is a thread that discusses it:

»www.avsforum.com/t/10595 ··· 14575377

I like microvolts and S/N Ratio as well.

Weither it is 8 or 9.5 dBf, it is pretty solid. Difference may be S/N or quieting at a particular level.

I know there is an applet based webpage that converts these, but I can't find it right now.

Enjoy!

Tim [KA0OUV]

HD Radio is DOA. More stations are turning it off than turning it on. I wouldn't buy an HD Radio.

I have HD decks in two trucks. I can't stand them! The HD channels are not constant, and when they go in and out there is a split second lag which is VERY annoying, especially since it happens quite regularly.
I have found no way to turn off the HD function.

Some radios cannot turn off HD. I would recommend anyone who gets one makes sure they can turn it off.

what does HD give you. I've never had it. I have XM and have been happy with it.

Yes, I do realize it cost for a subscription

I also looked at Sirius/XM, but at $20/month -- nope. $10 or less -- I'd probably get it.

HD radio supposed to have CD quality sound and some extra features.
See: »www.hdradio.com/what-is-hd-radio and »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio
You probably want the wiki page since that's a bit more technical.

HD Radio's sound will vary by how many channels they have. If they only have the main channel, it will sound pretty good. If they have 2-4, it will sound pretty bad.

HD Radio AM sounds like bad no matter what. Luckily half of HD AM stations have been turned off and counting.

I listen to a FM station with three HD channels and it sounds great.

Sound quality will vary widely depending on the station engineers in charge of the sound processing. Here in Columbus there are numerous HD stations and the quality varies from 'crap' to 'ok' to 'better than fm'. There is one single station though that does distinctly have CD quality and rightfully so with just a single HD channel. That is 103.5 WNND. And good music to boot!

I replaced the fairly crap stock single cd/fm radio in my brother's car last christmas with a cheap Dual branded receiver with does HD Radio, bluetooth (with an optional adapter which is routed to the headliner), A2DP, and USB. Build quality isn't the greatest but the functionality is just fine. Some of the annoyances with HD Radio are ones I suggest you just need to get used to. If you live within a major city the signal should be solid enough not to switch back and forth. Most stations here will stay locked wherever I go.

you can subscribe to the mostly music siriusXM package which gives you most music channels for $10 a month.

From an insider: it's the Ibiquity fees that are giving small and medium station cluster operators cold feet.

This is old news and an unfortunate choice for them. Without the exorbitant fees they'd probably see a much bigger uptake. Make the receiver chips super-cheap and you'd likely see it become a standard feature in cars and devices. Same side with broadcasters. Combine the two and people would probably be more willing to embrace it. Compared to currently where very few have it, broadcasters are in a literal set-it-and-forget-it mode and have no incentive to think otherwise.

There's also one particular issue that I hope stations can fix and that is proper audio processing. Half the time it seems like they just feed the analog pipeline destined for regular analog transmission straight into the HD encoder. The over-processing combined with the compression sounds like crap most of the time unless the compression is low enough and then it sounds 'ok'. In fact where I used to live there was a station that it sounded like they went even further and had pre-emphasis thrown into the mess as it always sounded like the high end was cranked up way too much. Thankfully they only had one channel so the compression artifacts were real low so the quality was acceptable.

To my prior post about WNND here in Columbus, it actually seems like they designed it for HD from the get-go. The analog broadcast is dull and flat with lacking highs but when it kicks over to HD it sounds like a flat-EQ'd CD with all of the quality intact. This is definitely a better example of what HD Radio CAN provide.

If I ever get an inkling and weather warms up some I may wire my laptop into the pre-outs on the radio in my brother's car and record some bits. I have an NS-HD01 but it isn't picking up the HD feed in the house unfortunately.

EDIT: I should mention though on the audio quality side, secondary and tertiary channels even with heavier compression will usually fare better in quality simply because they are usually designed with a fully digital process and thus less audio processing used and required. Cleaner audio for the encoder to deal with. And if you are lucky you can find a station with good subchannel programming. Where I used to live one of the mix stations had smooth jazz programming on the HD2 which I LOVED.

That's just part of it. The cost of putting in the system is exorbitant. Maintenance is both pricey and difficult. It lessens the analog signal coverage and audio quality degrades. And then there is the interference with first, second, and third adjacent stations and for that matter, interference with itself.

HD AM is dead. Over half of stations have shut it off now and there have been no new HD AM stations turning on in several years. HD FM is holding steady for now, but uptake has slowed greatly. The largest supporters of HD Radio have been public radio stations and the large broadcasters. Clear Channel and Cumulus are both losing interest in it.