HD radio

yeah, what's with am? i have to shut the hd off, sounds like a tin can. fm is great.

 

I've got an HD tuner at home, but not in the car (my Gen 3's a 2010, no HD for me).

At home I like it a lot. My analog reception of my local station is pretty marginal (their antenna is directly the other side of a large hill from my house) so the AM sounds lousy and hissy for several seconds until the HD locks in, then sounds great. I've never noticed any echo-y sound with the AM HD.

In bad weather though, the HD will lock ... fallback ... lock ... fallback ... and that's really annoying. Sometimes a station will have their analog and HD signals out of sync by a few seconds, too, which is like torture if your tuner keeps flipping between them. The company behind the HD technology has a web form to fill out when that happens, because they want stations to keep their signals in sync.

There are some different limitations just because AM bands fundamentally have less bandwidth than FM ... HD is supposed to make AM sound more like FM, and FM more like a CD.

-Chap

 

it makes my am news station sound like a tin can.

 

All I get where I live are Christian AM stations. I don't even get FM. The iPod is my solution.

 

Where are you, Michelle? On Saturn???

 

Down the Merced river canyon from Yosemite National Park, in the foothills. I can take a short walk and see El Capitan and Half dome. They aren't all that consequential from my spot but I can see them.

I just got internet services with the phone company about 4 years ago. It sucks big time but that's the only choice unless I go with Hughes Net and that sucks worse.

 

Well that sure is a beautiful area! Sounds like a great place to retire to.

 

My Sirius "subscription" radio fades out sometimes, but rarely. It sounds very nice, as do the HD channels.
My three favorite music channels, are the 50's, 60's, and 70's. (Yes, I'm that mature!) There is something like 200+ Sirius channels? I haven't even scratched the surface.

 

AND the wildflowers!

 

Holy smokes but spring was gorgeous this year. I've never seen as many wildflowers. It was extraordinary. I used to do botany and macro photography as hobbies and so have a unique appreciation for them. I hope we get such a show this coming spring.

 

AM sounds like the reverb box my brother put into his '56 Chevy when we were in high school.

 

I'm baffled by that ... my home HD tuner doesn't do that on AM at all ... I really can't think of an explanation for why a car tuner would ... is there some radio expert in the house who could think of why that might be? (My Prius is a 2010, so no HD, so I can't go listen for myself.)

One thing I do notice on my home tuner, the HD AM sound is almost obnoxiously bright ... on analog AM, the highs tend to be so buried that there's a huge contrast the instant HD locks in, it sounds like all the hiss went away but at the same time somebody cranked the treble to 11. It's probably really not far from what the station engineer wants me to hear, but when it comes on suddenly out of the much more rolled-off analog sound, it is jarring.

But a reverb sound? I'm at a loss. I know there can be a slow echo effect, if the HD is coming in and out of lock on a marginal station, and the station doesn't have the two signals in sync. But to sound like reverb, that would have to be happening many times a second, where the speed for the HD to lock seems more like a few seconds.

Last month (nothing to do with HD radio, but 'reverb' reminds me) I was at a gathering where people were watching the convention on a big TV and its built-in sound wasn't loud enough. I brought over powered computer speakers and plugged those in, and it wasn't much louder (the TV muted its own speakers when it detected the external set plugged in). We finally found a menu option on the TV to keep its own amp on and use the external speakers too, and that was louder, but it suddenly sounded like a reverb on the "stadium" setting, because there was just that much delay for some reason between the internal speakers and the headphone jack ... some tens of ms, I'd guess).

We even found an even more obscure setting on the TV menu to adjust the audio delay, but we could never make it sound right. Seemed like it only affected the digital output, which we weren't using.

-Chap

 

maybe it's the new england am broadcasters.

 

It could just be a phase issue. All you have to do is miss match the signal by a fraction of a wavelength and you'll get a cancelling effect, similar to reverb.

 

It's time for another musical interlude! One of the favorite songs when I was working the graveyard shift....

 

Can you elaborate on any conditions in which an HD radio decoder would do that? It is, of course, decoding a digital signal.

-Chap

 

I was thinking along the lines of how the stereo is set up... the length of wires, how the speakers are wired... that sort of thing. As far as the signal is concerned, if you don't get all of the digital signal, the radio will put it together as best it can. Missing bits could give you a messed up sound. The analog to digital converter takes in water and puts out mud. I don't know exactly what is going on here. I haven't been able to get an HD signal where I live to test it out.