To HD or not to HD?

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In an earlier article, I talked about the two classical stations that are now available locally on HD radio. This time around, I'd like to talk a bit more about the whole "HD" radio phenomenon and give you a feel for what's available to HD listeners in St. Louis (short answer: quite of a lot) and how you can become one of them.

Your first question would probably be "what the heck is HD radio, anyway?" It's a reasonable one, for sure, and easy to answer. "HD" radio is just digital broadcast radio—the radio equivalent of the digital broadcast television we've all gotten used to by now. Like the TV equivalent, digital radio channels are carried by established radio stations and are designated by numbers added to the station's call letters. So, just as you can now get channels 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4 on your TV, you can get (for example) KWMU 90.7 FM channels HD1, HD2, and HD3. As is the case with digital TV, digital radio channels can only be picked up by digital ("HD") radios.

The audio quality of HD channels is noticeably superior to analog FM, if not quite as wonderful as some promotional material would have you believe. The difference is most obvious with HD-only channels, but even channels that are simply a digital version of the station's analog programming have generally clearer sound. For a more detailed overview of HD radio technology, check out the HD radio wikipedia article.

The number and variety of available HD channels in St. Louis is impressive: 42, according to hdradio.com. Even if you eliminate the channels that are just copies of the analog stations, that still leaves you with 22 more program streams than you can get with analog radio. And some of them are definitely hitting niche markets. Aside from the two classical channels I talked about in my earlier article, you can get "Kerosene Country" on 92.3 WIL HD2, "My 80s Channel" on 94.7 KSHE HD3, "Hip Jazz" on 96.3 KIHT HD3, "The Deep-Classic Rock Album Cuts" on 106.5 WARH HD2, and even "The Mormon Channel" on WARH HD3 (insert cheap joke here).

Of course, whether or not you can get a particular HD channel will depend where you are with regard to that station's tower (I can't pick up any of the HD channels from KFTK 97.1 at my place in Soulard, for example) but even so there's something out there for almost everyone.

The downside? Well, to begin with, HD channels, like digital TV channels, are an "all or nothing"phenomenon. You either get a particular channel or you don't; unlike analog radio, HD doesn't degrade gradually. You'll also have to buy an HD radio to pick up these channels. Unlike digital TV, there are no converter boxes that will let your analog home or car stereo pick up digital channels.

The good news, though, is that you can add HD capability to your existing home or car systems pretty cheaply. Insignia (which seems to have the bargain HD market all to itself) makes a portable HD radio for around $50 that can be plugged into the aux input jack found on most newer cars. I have one in my '06 Prius and it works like a champ. For about the same money, they also sell a table model HD radio that can be played by itself or plugged into an existing receiver using the radio's headphone jack and an inexpensive ($10-$20 depending on where you get it) adapter cable. The also have an HD boombox with an iPod dock for around $100.

Another bit of good news is that, unlike digital TVs, HD radios also pick up all the analog stations as well.

HD radio hasn't caught on here the the USA the way the equivalent technology (digital audio broadcasting, or DAB) has in Europe and the UK, probably because it hasn't had the robust government support DAB has in Europe or that digital TV has here. Still, there's plenty of great stuff out there just waiting to be heard, and the price is right. I'm glad I added HD capability and I'm willing to be you will be as well.

Or are we losing our minds?

www.victor-victrola.com

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Earlier today I was listening to one of my favorites podcasts—The Antique Phonograph Music Program from WFMU in New Jersey. Host Michael Cumella and guest Michael Devecka were talking about the cost of a state of the art sound system circa 1925—specifically the RCA Victor-Victrola Credenza series (pictured). It was the company’s top of the line back then and sold for $275.00. In contemporary money that’s $3660.56. Could you get a state of the art music system for that kind of dough today?

A little Googling suggests that the answer is "probably not." You can get a very good surround sound system for well under $4000, no question. But state of the art? Expect to shell out a good two grand just on a top of the line receiver (like the Marantz SR7008). Add in a good BluRay player (the cheapest item; even the high end ones will only set you back a few hundred) and a really spectacular surround speaker system like the Axiom Epic series ($3600 and up) and your total bill will easily be two or three times what it would have been in 1925.

Now I'll grant you that state of the art sounds a hell of a lot better now than it did in 1925. But there's still no getting around the fact that, even after adjusting for inflation, being an audiophile burns a lot more dead presidents now than it once did. And not everything about contemporary sound reproduction technology is necessarily better.

That may seem nuts, but hear me out. Nearly 100 years after it was manufactured, that Victor-Victrola machine is still working and the discs that go with it can still be played. Will today's best in class systems still be working in 2100? The laser in the BluRay player certainly isn't going to last 100 years, for one thing. And even if the systems are still working, will there be anything around that they can play? Digital media, after all, are pretty fragile. A scratch in a record just makes a bit of noise. A scratch in a DVD kills it completely. Analog media degrade with wear. Digital media just shoot craps.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that most audio and video material is controlled by a small handful of corporations that have adopted what Vance Packard (in his sadly visionary 1960 classic The Waste Makers) dubbed "planned obsolescence" as their business model. Every few years, they come up with an innovation (or something they sell as an innovation) that makes your previous purchases obsolete. LPs replaced by tape. Tape replaced by CD. CD replaced by MP3 (a step back in sound quality, but that's another rant). On the video front film gave way to videotape, which gave way to DVD, which is giving way to BluRay, with will give way to 3-D BluRay, which will give way to who knows what (but you can bet Sony is working on it).

And with each iteration, some material doesn't make the cut for the next transition. A legion of great LP-era recordings that never made it to digital format; ditto the pre-LP era. With each new bright, shiny object, we lose a bit of our collective cultural memory.

Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the fact that even a mid-range sound system today beats the pants off what was available back when I was in college in the 1960s, and the range of music available is huge. But I also think that, to quote Joni Mitchell, "Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got / Till it's gone?"

"You need your human memory now," wrote singer/songwriter Buddy Bohn in the now-forgotten 1971 classic "Piccalilli Lady" (another digital conversion Left Behind), "But only 'til the show begins / Then when the curtain opens / And your memory forgets itself / There's nothing left to turn your head / To find out what had been there." Is it time to ask whether the cost of admission to that show might have been too much?

Stereotypes

The RCA trademark:
"Nipper" hearing "his master's voice"

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What with all the options we have these days for hearing music pretty much everywhere and any time we want, it's easy to lose track of how very unusual this is.  When I was growing up, a portable music system was a small transistor radio with a tiny speaker that played the local AM radio stations.  If you wanted to listen in stereo, you had to put an LP record on your home stereo system—assuming you had one.  We lived in a comfortably middle class household, yet we didn't own a stereo system until I was in 8th grade in the early 1960s.  The sound it produced is laughably primitive by today's standards, but back then it was something of a revelation to hear an actual symphony orchestra played back in multi-channel sound.

All this electronic nostalgia was brought on by a YouTube video (there's another entire set of memories.....) of a pair of promotional films produced by RCA Victor back in 1958.

The first one, about the revolutionary "living stereo" records and sound systems, explains the then-innovative concept of stereo recording and playback.  The second, though, is even more interesting.  It's a promo for a sound reproduction technology that didn't initially take off the way RCA hoped it would: the cassette tape.  These weren't the small cassettes that would come to dominate the market in the 1970s but rather a bulky unit about the size of a hardback book.  It ran and 3 and 3/4 ips (inches per second); half the speed of the conventional open reel tapes but twice the speed of the cassettes that would finally achieve commercial success and finally make portable audio a reality.

When I see someone nostalgically opine that music sounded better on LPs, I think back to what a pain it was to get decent sound out of that format in those days.  You needed a good pressing on high quality vinyl (surface noise was a killer), a high-end cartridge with a good needle (which needed to be cleaned regularly, as did the LP) and, of course, something to discharge the static that built up on LPs and attracted dust.  Entire support industries sprang up to deal with the shortcomings of LPs.  And even then the sound being enjoyed by the happy families in these films would be noticeably inferior to what you can get today from a moderately priced soundbar and your iPhone.

Being a classical music lover, of course, I was always more sensitive to sound quality, but even so I find it hard to wax nostalgic over the Good Old Days of stereo.  Some things really are better today.