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Post by bruiser on Feb 20, 2010 14:03:17 GMT -5
I'm thinking about getting an HD radio for my car. Anyone here have any real familiarity with it? Does it really help AM? I've never heard it, so I don't know.
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Post by Travis on Feb 21, 2010 10:02:30 GMT -5
I've never heard it, but nor can I say that I've heard anything negative about it. Max recently wrote about hearing oldies on an AM station while driving around in his car. That's being done here in Florida, as well, but unlike Max, I don't hear the music on AM in the same way that I remember hearing it as a teen. The sound is flat and lacks the bass & punch of the older AM radios; especially, those that had actual vacuum tubes during the '60s. I'm guessing that today's manufacturers save money by building the AM side of car radios as cheaply as possible since broadcasts are generally all talk on AM with music primarily on FM and in stereo. Ironically, another difference in playing oldies on today's AM may be that the songs are now digital. Contrary to popular belief, there is much missing in the sound of digital recordings when compared to their analog vinyl counterparts. Yes, we got surface noise, rumble, pops & scratches from vinyl but we also got a much broader range in sound. Classical music suffers the most in today's digital age with flutes sometimes sounding like a steady-state tone during the duration of a given note. Of course, the biggest reason why music on AM today may not sound as it did back in the day is because there may not be someone like Johnny Randolph who was constantly tweaking the audio processing, compressing as much as 30 dB, rolling off the low, low end, pegging the CBS Volumax, etc. HD Radio? Again, I don't know. If you get one, let us know.
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Post by bruiser on Feb 21, 2010 14:27:59 GMT -5
Travis, you're absolutely right about AM car radios, and home Am radios. They AM section seems to be mostly an afterthought, as everything is peaked towards FM. I remember when the old AM radios would pick up stations from hundreds of miles away. DXing. And car radios were even better. I listened to WLS quite a bit back in the sixties. Even heard the ol' Duke when he was their morning man. You probably can't get a whimper out if WLS on today's AM radios. The original radio in my car wouldn't even pick up WHAS when I got south of E-town. And that was only about 50 miles away. For shame! I put an aftermarket radio, Pioneer with cd and MP3 capability, and it will pick up WHAS much farther away than that, but it gets noisy. From time to time, I still do some dxing and I use a GE Super Radio for that. It does a good job, especially when used in conjuction with the Terk AM Advantage antenna. Sadly, that radio is no longer being manufactured.
From what I've read, the HD radio signal is not as strong as the analogue signal, so the radio will revert to the analogue format when the HD signal is weak.
BTW, I do have an AM stereo tuner made for automobile use. Got it fairly cheap, rigged up a 12V power supply, car antenna, plugged it into a small amp, and discovered it was no dx machine. It sounded OK, but of course there are no AM stereo stations in the area.
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Post by suzannesstud on Apr 8, 2010 19:31:18 GMT -5
I have an HD radio I use at work. It is a shelf system made by Insignia which looks like a boom box except this has the main unit in the middle and the two speakers, one on each side of it.
So far, I have had good luck with it. I am using it out of a building in Downtown Louisville from the 5th floor. For the antenna, it has a coaxial connection and to get a good signal, I used two dipole antennas (4 ends total) that I have stretched to the ceiling with the ends under the drop tile. Both are hooked to a splitter/combiner with the other end connecting to the radio.
All the local FM stations including WAKY come in excellent and absolutely no static. Those that have HD get full signal (6 bars and looks like what you see on a cell phone display) and they sound more like a directly connected feed rather than over-the-air.
AM is a serious challenge. Probably all the computers and electronics in our office interfering with the AM signal. WHAS will not come in nor will any other AM station except for a week signal on both 970 and 1080.
Although WAKY is not broadcasting in HD, I do get the title and artist of all the songs on the radio's display from their RDS feed the radio picks up and the call letters display as well. All of the HD stations use this and display this information. Some of the other non-HD stations also use RDS, and I get song information from them also.
I love my HD radio so far and the extra stations are cool, too. Some of them have an HD2 and HD3 that come in. I haven't had any problems so far with it switching between HD and analog. If the signal weren't as strong, it would switch back to analog until the signal became strong enough again to pull in the HD.
I don't know if WAKY has any plans to broadcast in HD at some point, but they told me they have been doing the RDS feed for a while so people with a compatible radio can see all the song information as it is played. It seems moot to have an HD radio at work since I keep it locked on WAKY, but I enjoy being able to look over at it when a song comes on where I can't remember the title or artist and it is showing on the display.
Maybe at some point, if it isn't to costly, WAKY might try HD. Sounds wonderful as is though with standard FM, and maybe it might be best as the old saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but I would be curious to hear what our legendary WAKY with all the jingles and oldies music would sound like in HD.
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