Cellphones went digital. Broadcast TV is going digital. So where’s digital broadcast radio?
Well, it’s here. But you might not necessarily notice it.
Four AM and 20 FM channels in the Greater Boston area are offering HDRadio, which provides digital signals. But unless you have radio equipped to receive them, you wouldn’t know they are there.
HDRadio came to my attention only because a receiver was bundled with the navigation package in my car and because of a David Pogue column in The New York Times. (Disclosure: I mention Pogue mainly because I don’t want the Plagiarism Police to pounce on me for observing some of the same things that he did.)
For example, I, too, am bemused by the fact that the “HD” in HDRadio doesn’t actually stand for anything. Indeed, iBiquity Digital Corp. – the electronics company that invented it – takes the unusual step in its PR materials of pointing out that the designation does not mean, as one might guess, “high definition” or “hybrid digital.” It’s just a brand name.
The way it works is that digital information is embedded in a HDRadio station’s standard analog radio signal. The overlay can simply be a digital version of the normal programming or may contain up to two additional channels. A HD receiver will detect and decode the information and switch over to digital mode. This means that with a home or office radio there is a discernable delay before the digital broadcast kicks in. When the radio is in motion, as in a car, your broadcast will shift back and forth between modes depending on how good the signal is.
Polk Audio loaned me one of its iSonic ES2s, a combination HDRadio and iPod speaker system, for this test. Like all one-piece systems, its stereo separation is limited to its width. Polk engineers decided to work around that by mounting speakers front and rear to create a 360 soundfield that would sound OK no matter where in a room you listen. I give them partial credit – the 360 effect is there, but the sound lacks some depth. At its original list price of $500, the ES2 was frankly not a good value. Recently the price has gone down to $400, and you can find them for a more reasonable $350.
The combination of HDRadio and iPod docking adds another feature: iTunes “tagging.” Information about the song that’s being played is also embedded in the radio signal. When the song is one that’s in Apple’s iTunes Music Store and you have an iPod docked in the device, a button on the radio illuminates. Push the button and the song information gets stored on the iPod. When you next sync it to your computer, a playlist of potential purchases is created in iTunes. While mainly a marketing ploy, this is an interesting marriage of modern music technologies that consumers likely will see more of in the future.
Polk’s PR representative warned me that antennas and antenna placement (two different kinds of FM and one AM antennas are included) were going to be a key factor in getting the HD signal. Indoor radio reception, especially in urban areas, always is a hassle. This is compounded, though, with HDRadio because the digital stream is pretty much all or nothing. As it turned out, the supplied antennas did just fine, and I was able to pick up almost all the local HD stations.
Alas the technology’s pluses do not rise to “must have” magnitude. The HD signal is clear and static-free, which makes for a nice improvement on FM and a spectacular one on AM. But it’s still the same old programming. Even when the station uses the multi-channel option, it’s usually just more of the same.
I found only two of the 24 local HD stations doing something that was worth noting. WBZ 1030, the AM news and talk station, truly profits from HD mode. The newscasts are clear and crisp instead sounding like they are coming from a closet. PBS station WGBH-FM uses all three possible channels and does so to good effect, delivering, for example, classical on one, jazz on another, and news on the third. Unfortunately they are the exception rather than the rule.
So while HDRadio may be the wave of the future, that future isn’t here yet.
