Sunday, 16 January 2005

High-Definition Radio Quality from an Engineer's Perspective . .  My colleague Tim Pozar responded to a link on BoingBoing to an article I’d posted earlier today about the RIAA wanting a broadcast flag to control the recording and replay of music from digital radio using high-definition (HD) format on AM and FM. Tim is a radio and microwave engineer of long standing, and he had this detailed response that he gave me permission to post: “Don’t just accept the marking hype with HD. There isn’t much additional quality gained with the DAB audio over analog. The bit rate for FM is currently 96Kb/s and NPR stations are petitioning to roll that back to 64Kb/s so they can sell the other 32Kb/s for other program content. Any 96 Kb/s audio stream does not equal ‘CD quality.’ [Via Droxy (Digital Radio)] Follow the link to read more. Extra Channels with HD . .  Forbes writes about an interesting sidenote to the iBiquity announcement at CES of thousands of radio stations committed to adding high-definition (HD) digital radio to their AM and FM broadcasts by 2007. Public radio stations are apparently particularly intrigued by the ability to add subchannels, thus being able to provide, say, all news on one channel and all music on another, or traffic and weather on one (lower fidelity) and classical music and news on another (higher fidelity). [Via Droxy (Digital Radio)]

Last update: 14/3/2005; 14:08:16. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.