Anybody know anything about HD radio? I was up in Atlanta this past week and heard radio commercials about HD radio. I was like, WTF is that? One commercial said something about channels between channels.
I suspect that it is a narrowing of the bandwidth that the stations use to send data most likely due to digitization. Digital radio would be more appropriate...
'HD Radio' is the consumer branding for IBOC ("in-band on-channel") digital radio that uses normal FM spectrum to simulcast radio in analogue and digital radio simultaneously.
The ad you heard would have been referring to the fact that the digital signal is broadcast between the analogue channels on the normal FM frequency range.
The US is pretty much the only country to use this method; most of the rest of the planet uses some variation of DAB digital radio that uses separate spectrum (based on the Eureka 147 standard which is obviously much to French for the FCC).
They are both shit for different reasons, and have their own upsides too.
To answer your question, Digital Radio is a way of allowing more stations into local broadcasting, while (supposedly) increasing the quality of the broadcast to CD- quality. It's Radio's way of fighting the Satellite threat.
Canada has spurned the US IBOC standard for a form of Eureka 147.
Problem is, the DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) standard was set in the early '90's, and newer, better forms of compression (AAC) have since been developed.
So DAB is inefficient, and has been ignored. Sales of receivers are virtually non-existent, despite the fact that almost all major stations broadcast a DAB signal in Toronto.
The broadcasters are likely waiting for the DAB 2.0 spec to emerge in a couple of months, before hyping Digital Radio here in Canada.
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The ad you heard would have been referring to the fact that the digital signal is broadcast between the analogue channels on the normal FM frequency range.
The US is pretty much the only country to use this method; most of the rest of the planet uses some variation of DAB digital radio that uses separate spectrum (based on the Eureka 147 standard which is obviously much to French for the FCC).
They are both shit for different reasons, and have their own upsides too.
Canada has spurned the US IBOC standard for a form of Eureka 147.
Problem is, the DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) standard was set in the early '90's, and newer, better forms of compression (AAC) have since been developed.
So DAB is inefficient, and has been ignored. Sales of receivers are virtually non-existent, despite the fact that almost all major stations broadcast a DAB signal in Toronto.
The broadcasters are likely waiting for the DAB 2.0 spec to emerge in a couple of months, before hyping Digital Radio here in Canada.