On Sat, 2013-01-05 at 14:54 -0500, Eddie G. O'Connor Jr. wrote: > is there REALLY such a thing as "HD RADIO"?.....as I've heard some > stations proclaiming? Dunno, digital radio hasn't taken off, here, either. The receivers are very expensive, all portable ones only have a mono speaker, the battery life is very short, reception is lousy. And, unlike analogue, where reception just gets noisier with distance, digital radio goes like mobile phones, where the audio just cuts out every fraction of a second, or completely dies. Traditional analogue radio and TV has less than HiFi reproduction. It's only 15 Hz to 15 kHz, whereas HiFi usually is 20 Hz to 20 kHz. It's easier to manage a narrower bandwidth, most older people can't hear much beyond the narrower bandwidth, and most people (of any age) don't hear the full bandwidth when in a noisy environment, anyway (listening to the radio in the car, or TV in the home). And there's very little dynamic range (the ratio between quietest and loudest sounds has been squashed together), with the stations doing this for ease of listening in a noisy environment (make the quiet sounds louder, and squash all the louder sounds down to similarly loud levels - notice how a whisper, normal speach, and a yell are all strangely similar in volume, on TV), and as a way of dealing with electrical noise on the sound (make everything louder than the hiss of the noise floor). Digital radio has the ability to improve on this, to sound even better than compact audio discs: Have a wider bandwidth, because it can handle it (the analogue transmitter constraints don't apply. And the ability to handle a full dynamic range, allowing the receiver to be adjusted to provide compression where it's useful (e.g. the radio in the car), or none where it's actually a nuisance (e.g. the music lover listening to a concert in their lounge, without any kids making a ruckus in the room). But suffers immensely from the heavy data compression being applied to the stream, as stations try to squeeze umpteen stations into the same radio bandwidth. Never mind the reception issues, digital radio is often worse in audio quality than analogue. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
