HD vs Satellite Radio

Ever hear what XM called 'XMHD'?

Three A/V receivers ago, I had a Sony that had a built in XM tuner and supported Neural 5.1 on XM. There were only two 5.1 stations, XM Pops and Fine Tuning. Personally I loathe classical music. Listing to it makes me want to put sharp pointy objects in my ear holes, but it really showcased what SDARS is capable of if bandwidth wasn't an issue. Those two stations sounded phenomenal and the only thing that I've heard with better audio quality were DVD-As. Even on normal XM receivers they sounded pretty good due to the additional bandwidth

IMO, 80s on 8 sounds pretty good, at least on the Sirius side it's the best sounding station. Too bad I generally hate 80s music. Just my own opinion, but I think they allocate more bandwidth to ch 8 since its the #1 channel on satellite according to Arbitron ratings. And of course Howard Stern's channels sound miles better then any other talk content on Sirius XM.

Hadn't heard, stopped subscribing to XM when I bought my station, but..it came free for awhile with the last 2 vehicles. Sad that XM, or Sirius, given the potential for exceptional sound on all channels would ever limit what they deliver, then market something with that damn HD catch phrase, implying the rest of their channels are not as good. BAD marketing if you ask me. "We've got these exceptional audio channels and the rest are not as good" is how I would read that as a person who looks for how things are marketed and lives on doing the same for clients every day. Interesting post, thank you for bringing it up!

I blame it on the FCC when they came up with the SDARS licences and handed out the spectrum way back when. Sirius and XM got a certain amount of bandwidth and that's all they had to work with. They choose quantity over quality, because quite frankly no one would subscribe if they had 10 or 20 channels of CD quality music. In order to made the best of a bad situation they came up with more efficient codecs over the years, but that will only get you so far. Nothing wrong with using the HD moniker. Do you feel the same way when Dolby and DTS came out with TrueHD and HD Master Audio respectively? Was regular Dolby AC3 and DTS now not so good of of a sudden.

As exchange for investing $80M, Clear Channel received a portion of XMs spectrum to do with what they please. There were four FM simulcast stations (WSIX Nashville, WLTW NYC, WHTZ NYC, KIIS LA) on XM, along with a couple talk stations that were hodge podge of syndicated talk shows from Premier Radio Networks, the talk radio arm of Clear Channel. Besides the idiot DJs and commercials, you could instantly tell you were on a Clear Channel station because of the audio quality. Clear channel didn't stuff a million channels in their limited bandwidth on a service with limited bandwidth.

I remember the Clear Channels' stations on XM! It was fun to hear them....not sure how they arranged that when the FCC wanted no "local" content on the satellite service, as a provision of "not competing" with local terrestrials....but, it was good while it lasted. Personally, I wish we COULD upload local radio to satellite services like XM and Sirius. WION Radio would be first in line to raise our hand to do it! (of course, the cost would be HUGE, I'm sure.)

radio said:

Deadly game? Oh, come on... It's a valid point I made...and it is, indeed. Apples to apples, It's what your ears HEAR that matters, and that depends on what the source operator does to maintain quality end to end.

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Analog and digital are in no way an apples to apples comparison. That's like asserting that NTSC broadcasts are as good or better than DTV broadcasts -- baldfaced hogwash.

Even on HD FM, if you don't maintain quality from the console to the transmission, you get crap.

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I'm not talking about the reality of most radio stations, I'm talking theory about how much you can cram in a given bandwidth using analog and digital technologies. That HD radio has to coexist with analog radio probably shouldn't be taken away from HD radio but rather analog be called out for its relatively inefficient use of bandwidth. Amateur Radio bandwidth used for Morse code versus RTTY is perhaps a very similar comparison.

For every conscientious radio engineer there are a hundred that just don't seem to care (or are covering too many stations to be able to to care). The bigs have seen to it that running a radio station is more a matter of counting beans than a craft.

Then there's my local station where the talent runs the pots and as long as the VU meters aren't resting on the top peg, they're happy. Of course their Internet feed digitizer doesn't feel the same way about blowout audio levels.

As far as I understand it the removal of most of the Clear Channel content on XM was due to the merger. WHTZ and KIIS are still being simulcast on Sirius XM. Not sure why the desire for ‘local’ content on satellite radio. Why pay money for commercial laden stations that play 95% of the same content you can get over the air. I called customer service early on and had all of the FM simulcast stations on XM blocked on all of my radio IDs, like you could do with the XL channels just to make a point. After the FM stations were replaced with Clear Channel controlled non FM simulcasts, I called up and had the channels unblocked. When Clear Channel then decided to add commercials to Sunny, Mix, Kiss and Nashville, I again called up and had them blocked.

Before the launch of satellite radio, in the late 90s/early 2000s, I traveled to many major markets in the North in the span of a handful of years. Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and probably a few that I’m forgetting. I primarily listen to Country and Rock. All of these radio stations sounded the same. Same limited playlists, same lame commercials with car dealers screaming me, same nationwide contests just with different names, even the bumpers and jingles sounded similar. Besides the differences is local morning zoo shows and shock jocks, they were all cookie cutter stations that were no different than the stations back at home.

The original posts from 2007/2008 indicating limited reception range for HD were I believe before the increase in HD power was implemented. Also different from the original posts at least some HD radios (including the one in my 2017 Hyundai Ioniq) allow you to turn off the HD reception, which is useful in areas of marginal signal to prevent constant switching between HD and analog. Here in the north of Tampa area the HD subchannels I use most are those on the public radio stations (WMNF, WUSF, and WJUF) and a few FM stations which rebroadcast Tampa AM stations on their HD subchannels, useful as the Tampa AM stations have trouble making it this far north, especially at night. That all said I mostly use SXM when I want to listen to music and FM/HD for news and talk programming.