04-17-2009, 01:56 AM
Black wrote:
I've had an HD radio at work for several months. The stations that come in well are great. Nice being able to see who the DJ and the artist/song are on the display. There are a lot of stations I can't get at all, so I mostly stick with WXRT and now and then a bit of NPR to distract me so I can get my documentation done. I get no dropouts on either station.
The sound quality is definitely better than standard FM, and this is coming from someone who won't use the iTunes Music Store because most of the bitrates are only 128k.
Listening to the radio in your office is far different from listening to the radio driving in a car. In a moving car you can have severe multipath fades due to receiving a radio signal not only direct from the transmitter antenna, but reflections off of buildings as well. With a normal FM radio, you simply experience a degraded signal to noise ratio, but with digital radio you will experience a catastrophic failure all at once. Have you ever noticed that if you're sitting at a stoplight and getting poor radio reception that you can just move your car up a tiny bit and everything is better? This is the result of multiple radio sources going into or out of phase.
The last few MP3's I've d/l from the iTunes store were 256 Kb/s. I didn't even know that they still sold MP3's encoded at 128K.