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Review: HD Radio Isn’t Quite Ready For The World

Over the past fifteen years, technology has made an impact on the way everyday people listen to music. With the birth of digital streaming media, portable music jukeboxes and online music retailers (like Yahoo! Launch, the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, respectively), classic venues of listening to music like cassettes and even radio are falling by the wayside.

HD Radio (or “Hybrid Digital” Radio) is hoping to revive the lost art of listening to AM and FM stations. With the promise of multiple streaming music and talk channels in crystal-clear FM- or CD-quality, consumers are beginning to turn heads at this new way of listening to the radio. However, while HD Radio promises great things, there’s also some issues that plague the new technology. Here, I decided to check out the good, and bad, of HD Radio.

Intro: The first major misconception about HD Radio that should be cleared up is its name. People are familiar with seeing the “HD” moniker associated with HDTV, or high-definition television. However, HD Radio is not high-definition; instead, the “HD” stands for hybrid digital. That is, a combination of analog radio signals and digital radio signals create the new technology.

It works like this: Take your favorite FM station (we’ll use 108.9FM, a fictitious station, as an example). 108.9FM boasts that it broadcasts in the brand-new HD Radio format, thus promising multiple stations and a clearer format. Truth be told, 108.9FM broadcasts inboth HD Radio and standard analog radio. If your reception is good enough, you should have no problem picking up an HD Radio signal and all those great multiple stations associated with 108.9FM. But let’s say you’re a commuter who drives from one major city to another. You begin to travel away from the 108.9FM signal, and suddenly you’re too far away to receive 108.9FM’s digital signal. The radio simply switches back to 108.9FM’s analog signal until the reception becomes poor and you can’t pick up a signal at all.

What makes HD Radio different: That’s what makes HD Radio incredibly different from other digital broadcasting means. Unlike Digital Television (DTV), which is separate from regular analog television, HD Radio uses a hybrid of analog and digital signals to deliver content to your stereo. This hybrid of analog and digital signals means HD Radio is “backwards compatible,” meaning even if your favorite radio station isn’t broadcasting a digital signal yet, you can still pick it up with HD Radio.

HD Radio is also different in the way it provides content. Since HD Radio is a relatively new technology, most stations broadcasting an HD station deliver national content rather than local content. Say, for example, 108.9FM HD-1 broadcasts the regular local station, while the station makes soft rock available on 108.9FM HD-2. Chances are, 108.9FM does not program content on 108.9 HD-2; instead, that content is likely programmed from 108.9FM’s owner.

This is true in the way Clear Channel provides HD Radio streams. Clear Channel’s Format Lab provides different genres of music and talk to the hundreds of Clear Channel radio stations across the country. The stations are programmed by a think tank at Clear Channel’s corporate offices and are overseen by a few hundred Clear Channel employees. While Format Lab delivers an amazing collection of music formats for radio enthusiasts, listeners miss out on the localization of the stations, including traffic, weather and the unmistakeable local voice of a human disc jockey.

The reception issue: I decided to test HD Radio recently, using a Dice Electronics iTR-100 tabletop radio and a powerful Terk AM/FM HD-Ready indoor antenna. With the promise of a few dozen HD stations available at my command in Sacramento, I was excited to see what I would pick up.

Out of the box, the Dice Electronics radio appeared to be pretty advanced. The radio featured a two-line alphanumeric display capable of showing the frequency, the call letters and song/listener information on the music playing or the current jock. The radio has one speaker, which I found unusual for a radio boasting new listening technology—wouldn’t it make sense to have two speakers so the user could enjoy clear, true-stereo sound? Turns out, there’s quite a few radios on the market that only have one speaker. Odd. The radio also came without the ability to tag songs heard on the air for download to iTunes, a feature HD Radio manufacturers have been marketing over the past year.

The first thing I noticed is that living in-between Sacramento and San Francisco (where this testing took place) had its disadvantages. Only KSEG 96.9FM, KSFM 102.5FM, KRXQ 98.5 and KXJZ 90.9FM were strong enough to pull in a HD Radio signal; KGBY 92.5FM and KWOD 106.5FM would occasionally pull in a signal depending on the time of day and the weather. Stations like KQJK 93.7FM, KSSJ 94.7FM, KZZO 100.5FM and KHYL 101.1FM only pulled in a strong FM signal; there was no HD signal from any of those stations. No station from San Francisco was strong enough to pull in a HD Radio signal.

Not only could I pick up just three out of the dozen stations promised, they would occasionally display the wrong information. For instance, Clear Channel’s KGBY 92.5FM, which teeters in and out of an HD signal, depending on the weather and time of day, would sometimes display its call letters as “KABO” despite the fact that nowhere in the United States is there a radio station broadcasting with such call letters. CBS Radio’s KYMX 96.1FM also shows incorrect call letters, broadcasting as WRM (again, there is no station broadcasting as WRM in the United States). Oftentimes, the data would appear jumbled in the display when it came to song and artist information.

The pricetag: HD Radio is a relatively new technology, and like all new technologies (think DVDs and computers), it’ll be a little while before the pricetag comes down. Current HD Radios for cars run anywhere from $99 to the hundreds for fancier models. Standalone HD Radio tuners, for people who want HD in their cars will run you about $200. Home models, like the Dice Electronics radio tested in this post as well as others manufactured by Sony, Insignia, Boston Acoustic and others start around $150. HD Radio manufacturers must pay a fee to iBiquity, developer of HD Radio technology, for use of their tuner hardware necessary to receive the digital signals (adding to the cost of the radio).

If you buy a home radio, you’ll likely need to upgrade the antenna, especially if you don’t live in an area with great radio reception—quality antennas, like those manufactured by Terk, will run anywhere from $20 to $75 depending on what type you get and where you purchase from.

The skinny: The world may not be ready for HD Radio quite yet. Signal quality still isn’t as great as it could be, radios are expensive and the extra programming hardly makes it worth the purchase. HD Radio has great potential for the future if radio broadcasters can tap into the marketable values HD Radio brings, instead of saturating signals with national programming. HD Radio can be treated as a hobby for excited broadcasters and listeners to use in an experimental fashion, but it’s far from being ready for the serious audio consumer.

The alternatives: Satellite radio, which does provide national programming, can be heard in more places than HD Radio. There’s no need to worry about analog signals with the 100% digital programming from satellite radio providors XM and Sirius. The ability to stream satellite radio via the Internet at home and the office also makes it a great competitor to HD Radio. However, unlike the ad-supported HD Radio, satellite radio comes with a pricetag running about $13 a month (less if you pay annually).

Internet radio streams, especially those which can be streamed to a tabletop stereo or home theatre via Squeezebox and others, provide listeners with thousands of choices for free (less the price of the broadband service a person would use to connect to the online world). Internet radio provides thousands of possibilities with talk radio, sports, special interest programming and music, and since there are tens of thousands of places to log on to the ‘net throughout the world (coffee houses, grocery stores, airplanes, etc.), the Internet is making a name for itself in broadcasting.

Still, if you find yourself really curious about those “hidden stations” on your dial, invest in HD Radio. But take my word for it, you’re not missing much.