Who put the “HD” in “HD Radio”?

Like many people, I’ve recently been hearing more and more about this new thing on the air waves called HD Radio. What is it we are talking about here?

Well, first off, the HD does not stand for “high definition” (it seems to stand for nothing — it’s just a marketing ploy), and it doesn’t provide anything like HD quality. The second most important part is that you have to have a special receiver to get these, which are still a tad expensive and aren’t standard equipment on much of anything yet.

What does it give you? It gives you the potential for a 300 kbps audio stream. In reality you get little more than 100 kbps of total capacity, which is often split up into multiple channels.

So, there are some goods here: we can cram two or three FM-quality broadcasts in some of the extra bandwidth around current FM transmissions. There is also pressure for these stations to remain commercial-free for a bit longer to increase adoptions, but it won’t last: the service is intended to be free, like current AM/FM stations, so it will have to be ad-supported in the future.

There are a lot of “buts” though:

• It’s proprietary. The only way to make or receive the transmissions on equipment is to pay a royalty to the company that owns the technology, iBiquity.
• It has all of the faults of terrestrial radio. The same problems you have with AM and FM stations will stay with these HD Radio stations. HD Radio is supposed to be some sort of response to satellite radio providers, but is still limited to your local area and whatever music they decide to put on.
• There have been some complaints that the HD Radio signals are incredibly weak, faint, and interfere with other signals because of the way they are transmitted.
• Quality isn’t much better than satellite. I was an XM subscriber for a while, and their audio bitrates were typically 40 kbps for the popular music channels, and less (8–24 for stations like news, etc.). Although HD Radio has the potential to exceed this, the providers are more likely to just populate the bandwidth with more channels, giving about the same quality as satellite providers.
• No one knows about them! If no one figures out or cares enough about them, then they will just die.

Personally, unless iBiquity can get HD Radios into every new car that comes out, I don’t see it as being a lasting business: DOA. Satellite is better in almost every way, and is already an installable option in many vehicles nowadays.

And it certainly isn’t HD.