hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3276.txt

Episode: 3276
Title: HPR3276: Deepgeek's thoughts about HD Radio
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3276/hpr3276.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:01:46

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3,276 for Monday the 22nd of February 2021.
Today's show is entitled Deep Geeks Thoughts About HD Radio and in part of the series,
Information Underground, It is hosted by Deep Geek and in about 10 minutes long and
Karimaklin flag.
The summer is, Klaatu reads the post by Deep Geek.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
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Hey everybody, this is Klaatu, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio.
A friend of mine, Deep Geek, you might know him from Hacker Public Radio, emailed me the
other day and asked me if I'd be interested in reading for him on his behalf, a script
that he had written for an episode and just didn't have time to to record himself.
I had to record and edit and I said yes because honestly I have a Hacker Public Radio.org
email address.
I don't know what status I am in terms of administration but I feel like I need to pull
my own weight around here for a change so I'm doing things like this.
So here's Deep Geeks Thoughts on HD Radio and from from this point on more or less,
I will read it from his perspective.
My mixed feelings about HD Radio, I love music especially while I drive and I really
do love my car stereo, but I have many mixed feelings about HD Radio.
HD Radio is American Digital FM Radio, even though it's a proprietary system, I love
its capabilities.
However, when the rubber hit the road, I found that it came up short.
I don't want to go into whether or not we could have used one of the already existing
digital radio standards here but I'd like to concentrate instead on what digital radio
could be in America and what it ended up being.
Let's talk capabilities.
HD Radio as a technology offers many capabilities.
There's hybrid mode, backward compatible analog audio with digital audio in a sub-channel,
multi-casting.
You can have one or more additional digital channels as well as the main audio channel.
More digital offers five channels as opposed to stereo to channel.
More akin to a movie theater experience, you get that kind of surround sound experience.
Pure digital also offers higher audio quality with a fallback to a lower bit rate audio
quality when you're at a greater distance from the transmitter.
I've listed these in order of how familiar they are with most users of HD Radio in car
receivers.
Most people in America are experiencing the first two of these features, the hybrid mode
and the multi-casting.
That is to say, the FCC has mandated hybrid mode for its backward compatibility with existing
analog car radios and most modern HD radio listeners have also probably noticed that when
digital service is available, an indicator pops up on their car stereo offering three channels
to choose from.
HD radio commercials refer to this as the stations between the stations or under the
stations.
Often an adult pop or, as they say, triple A format in the radio industry will be on the
analog and first HD channel with a news channel or a specialty genre like smooth jazz or
Christmas music on a second or a third channel.
Now let's talk about quality and selection.
Not being a fan of triple A radio, I have had the experience of converting a car to HD
radio at Best Buy with a car I've owned before my current one.
I wanted greater variety in what I could hear while I drove around so I did this in order
to have more channels.
I also got, at the same time, the ability to plug a USB thumb drive full of MP3s into
the stereo.
In practice, this meant that I could listen to extra channels when close to New York City
and the ability to hear pre-recorded MP3s of my favorite classical and alternative music
elsewhere.
What I've noticed is that quality suffered.
It turns out that when in hybrid mode, which is that first one, the backwards compatible
one, when in hybrid mode, you are left with 96 kilovits per second of digital streaming.
There's a chart from a web page that shows the common multicasting configurations, which
I'll link to in the show notes.
A common configuration is main analog content on 48 kilovits per second on channel 1, secondary
audio content 48 kilovits per second on channel 2, and an additional 24 kilovits per second
on channel 3.
As most people who have generated their own MP3 files know, bitrate like 48 kilovits
per second is the most important determination of audio quality.
What does a geek do when he finds himself up against the division of bitrate?
Well, he creates a test file or two and encodes them in different amounts of bitrate
to see what he can hear.
I've noticed by doing this experiment that I can differentiate up to 128 kilovits per
second.
Can't really tell the difference between, say, 128 kilovits per second and 160 kilovits
per second.
Probably because I'm an old man, but hey, can't do anything about that.
Inactuality, does this really matter?
Again, I'm blessed with location.
At work, the location that I'm often sent to, I'm in range of both a classical station
in digital, as well as a local analog repeater.
And I did indeed find that I would rather listen to classical on the old school analog
FM rather than its 48 kilovits per second digital version.
However, I don't mind listening to alternative at the lower bitrate, and I do like that same
classical station through an iHeart radio app, which plays it at 128 kilovits per second.
I think it's time to concede that there needs to be an admission of or a recognition of
what's good enough.
For example, since I can't tell the difference between 128 kilovits per second and 160 kilovits
per second, personally, for me, 128 kilovits per second is good enough.
And while I believe that, again, good enough for me is 128 kilovits per second for classical,
48 kilovits per second for alternative, it might not be that way for other people.
Let's talk about financial pressure for the media company.
The media company or the radio station or the producer of the curated audio program
has their financial pressures to contend with.
Local FM analog stations pay a lot in electric to broadcast, not to mention all the other
costs involved, like salaries, licensing facilities, imagine adding to this the licensing and
royalty fees of a proprietary technology and a five-digit price tag for new equipment.
This cost makes stream hosting look like a stroll in the park, and we aren't talking
about an unlimited bandwidth web hosting account.
Just ask truly popular podcasts how quickly unlimited hosting plans get changed to a
more metered approach.
Stream hosting companies are a lot more cost-effective than converting to digital broadcast.
So what happens is that the FM radio station adds an internet stream to their lineup.
Once people all over the internet get their 128 kilovits per second stream via internet
apps, some of which are pre-built into new car stereos, it may not make sense to have
a digital broadcast anymore.
The tendency is now that the very largest of the media companies can afford to have a
digital broadcast and smaller operators have an app as their digital operation.
If a smaller operator does modernize HD radio, the possible revenue streams from a second
audio channel may be the only thing making them willing to put the cost of the digital
conversion.
So why would the broadcaster decide to forego a second audio channel they could hawk just
to have their primary audio channel go out with more bandwidth, especially if they could
simply tell any listener who really cares about audio quality, that their web stream offers
more quality than the FCC currently allows HD radio operators to deliver.
Let's talk about financial pressure for the listener.
On the other hand, who can afford to build a listening room for high fidelity audio?
Many people don't even know, for example, that the humble compact disk has a high tech
successor called the Super Audio CD.
As I've said before, I've discovered that 128 kilobits per second MP3 is good enough
for me.
It's also the standard that my internet radio from Ocean Digital runs over my home media
server.
I do have a couple of 48 megahertz FLAQ files I can play back on my home computer, but
as far as I can tell, I like the sound of those the same as 44.1 and would probably only
listen to them if I wanted to hear a different orchestra playing a song that I like rather
than listening to them specifically for increased audio quality.
As an extra treat here at the ending, I've asked a questioned internet historian Jason
Scott, who made a podcast about my question, and I'll link to that in the show notes.
And that's everything.
Folks, that's DeepGeek talking about HD radio.
It's a topic that I, Clatsu, know nothing about, I've not heard HD radio far as I know,
but that's DeepGeek's thoughts about it.
Maybe you have thoughts about it.
Maybe you want to record an episode in response to this.
Who knows?
The possibilities really are limitless.
Unlike the bandwidth, it requires to send out a digital signal from HD radio.
See, I did learn something.
Thanks for listening.
I'll talk to you next time.
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