HD radio is dumb

Not sure how it is in other parts of the country, but in LA, there are lots of ads on the radio now for HD radio. It's the next cool thing... Listen to the hidden stations and be cool... Get crystal clear audio... Hear new channels...

Hey, HD radio people: fail.

Look, HDTV makes a lot of sense. Analog TV is not near a perfect visual resolution (which would be where pixels are too small for eyes to distinguish), and HDTV is a noticeable improvement. But... my radio is already pretty clear. It's not like you need a lot of bandwidth to represent sound very accurately; it's why MP3 audio files are an order of magnitude smaller than MPx/DIVX video files.

So what do I get if I buy a HD radio receiver? Commercial free radio? Nope. Clearer audio? Not that I'll be able to tell. Better reception? Doubt it. DRM on the radio broadcasts? Possibly. Different/new/interesting content? Nope. So, um... why would I buy this?

Yeah, fail.

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 27, 2007 at 6:31 PM

    You sure got this one right, but I call HD Radio a good-old farce:

    http://hdradiofarce.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. NickNovember 29, 2007 at 10:33 PM

    Nice... didn't realize there was a blog as detailed as yours explaining just how much of a scam it was. And here I thought it was just a fecal nugget being smeared on the American public by media companies, like K-Fed was.

    Although I have to give props to iBiquity for basically being the Nigerian lawyer of tech bandwagon chasing. I wonder if I could get $50/person for selling cool new HD blogging...

    ReplyDelete

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