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Comment by epivosism | Hacker News Reader

Growing up in the 90s you could tell when digitification came in - radios and tvs started to take forever to change stations. Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.

I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.

More generally it seems like when industries are growing, there is competition in this kind of area, but later on this dies off. I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?

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I've got a brand new Kia. The FM radio comes on so fast, it's surprising. Every car I've ever had always has had some sort of warm up time or a splash screen on the infotainment system while it's booting up. This Kia has none of that. Audio is immediately present and tuning to other stations is immediate as well. It's almost a little unnerving how quickly audio comes out since we've always been used to slower FM radios, CD players, satellite radio, and music streaming apps that just take short moment to go to the next station or song.

Also, one thing to remember is that FM radios have been "digital" for quite some time. I'm not talking about HD radio or DAB receivers. FM demodulation chips have existed for a long time (TDA7000 came out in 1983). They handle tuning, demodulation, and amplification all-in-one. The only slow part would be whatever microcontroller has to manage the interface in the receiver. You can even get FM transceiver chips dirt cheap like the one that is in the infamous Baofeng ham radio. It's got one chip doing all of the radio work.

My Toyota does the worst of both worlds -- the audio portion comes up immediately, with whatever volume setting it had when it was shut off.

The volume knob doesn't respond until about 8 seconds later.

I'm sure you can imagine situations (like in a driveway such as mine, where the neighbor's bedroom window directly overlooks it) where what was appropriate at 3pm when I got home, is not appropriate at 3am next time I start the car...

It's amazing how designers of these vehicles can't think of these simple things.

Being able to lower the volume should be immediate, and it should be obvious in their testings...

If they ever tested infotainment systems of course.

A lot of this makes sense when you realize that modern cars are designed by engineers who take a bus to work.

That makes sense. Though wish it wasn't the case.

This is even worse on my Dodge. Like yours, the audio comes in immediately, and the volume knob may or may not work for a time. The bluetooth takes absolutely forever to connect so it defaults to another input, typically FM radio. The bluetooth input also has no volume boost setting so I have the volume turned up quite a bit, thus the radio is loud as hell.

All in all, this means that I regret it if I forget to turn the volume down when I get out of the car.

Sounds like the same system as in my Subaru. I don't even know how you can design a system to emit audio and and not be volume controllable for like millions of CPU cycles. And you'd think with like about two dozen buttons on the steering wheel, one of them would allow you to mute control the phone mic when your are on a conference call.

> I've got a brand new Kia. The FM radio comes on so fast, it's surprising. Every car I've ever had always has had some sort of warm up time or a splash screen on the infotainment system while it's booting up

They simply never power of the Head Units, even if they go dark. And I am not talking of the constant power feature head units head since forever but the CPU actually doing stuff. Most of the time the satellite data is held fresh to give you an immediate position fix if requested.

If you completely detach it from power you would notice that there is a startup time.

Doesn’t that run the battery down?

It does. I have a Subaru with a head unit that stays powered on, and it has ran itself down more frequently than any other car I've had. The explanation I got from the dealer was that the residual drain on the battery is much higher, so there's less capacity to start the car. I keep a lithium ion jump starter charged and in the car, and I've had to use it a few times. If you can keep each and every OTHER draw on the battery down, it's fine.

The biggest thing that helped was realizing that the battery dies when the key fob was hung up with our other keys. Coincidentally, this was exactly the right distance for the car to constantly wake and sleep itself as it thought the key fob was entering and leaving its vicinity. Between adequate key fob faraday cages, making sure the interior lights are in the automatic or off position, and making sure all the doors are closed we haven't had a dead battery in a while.

What a pain in the ass.

Manufacturers must be able to do this because of higher capacity glass-mat batteries and low power CPUs.

The Baofengs have two FM chips according to this teardown. [0]

AT1846S Single-Chip Transceiver

RDA 5802N Single-Chip Broadcast FM Radio Tuner

[0](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/teardown-tuesday-baofe...)

You’re totally correct. I just wanted to clarify the various ways that radio can decode FM digitally. Please correct me if I’m mistaken. I’m still real new to this world.

Does your by any chance have remote onlocking or nearby unlocking features (or are the radio modules installed by default)? Some cars start the boot sequence well before you enter the key/car for the infotainment systems.

Maybe you're thinking of a different chip for digital FM? The TDA7000 chip is completely analog, with R-C filters, oscillators, mixers, a variable capacitor and varactor diodes for tuning, and so forth.

> I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.

I don't think that's much of a contributor. It's just really easy now to bring your own music (or podcast, or audiobook, or...) to the car with you via your phone, and I suspect people generally prefer to listen to their own curated music (or music a streaming service has curated for them) rather than putting up with radio ads, songs they don't like, etc. Just about the only benefit to listening to the radio would be to stumble upon new music, but you can do that with streaming services too. I guess some people like to listen to talk radio (NPR and the like), but most of that stuff is also available online.

I still have a fairly old car with an analog radio, and I haven't used it in at least 5 (but probably closer to 10) years.

Ditto for TV: the on-demand experience via Netflix (etc.) is just so much better than watching regular network or cable TV. Why would I subject myself to having to be in front of the TV at a particular time on a particular day to watch what I want to watch? Honestly, it baffles me that the standard cable TV model still even exists. Obviously the Comcasts of the world still make enough money off of it to make it worthwhile to sell, but it just seems like an entirely poor experience no matter how you look at it.

I have to agree with epivosism about the TV experience. Waiting for the digital decoder to catch an I-frame slows down browsing immensely and it's just a lot less fun. Tivos are better, because they have multiple tuners and can scan the channels above/below the one you're on, which helps a lot. But it's still not as good as pushing the button on an analog tuner's remote and getting a new signal in < 1/15 of a second.

Maybe your comparison of live vs streaming TV is skewed because it takes so long to start a new stream that it's hard to imagine browsing content directly, instead of trying to imagine the content from movie posters.

Streaming video doesn't need to use I-frames for sync, there's a technique called intra refresh they can use to limit the error. That also helps with the nasty "pumping" artifacts you get on static images.

Some codecs do reorder frames for efficiency though (H.264 can be 10 frames out of order but realistically only goes up to 3), which means you have to decode a few before displaying the start frame.

> ... the only benefit to listening to the radio would be to stumble upon new music

This benefit has gone down a lot since the late 90s. There's a nice wikipedia article on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_homogenization

That said, I recommend listening to college radio wherever you are. I truly love the station from my hometown, WHRW broadcasting from Binghamton University. What a strange and beautiful melange.

As a counter-point, I also have an older car with an analog radio and 100% prefer to listen to it while on the road than to listen "to my own music from the phone" (tangentially, I don't even have my own music on the phone, nor a Spotify-like subscription).

I found out that listening to the radio gets you lots of excellent unknown-unknowns when it comes to music, especially if you listen to public radio (which, in my country, has almost no ads). For example, during my last trip I remember that tuning in to the arts-oriented public radio station got me the chance of listening to some great tango classical music which I would have never thought of purposefully listen to.

I'm 100% with you when it comes to TV, the cable signal broke or something (some decoding stuff, can't tell) a couple of years ago and I didn't bother calling in the TV cable guys to look at it and fix it. It is quite excellent. We do have Netflix, which we spend some time on but not that much lately, plus I do have a TV-sports station subscription which I use for major events (like the Olympics right now). For sports I have to be careful though not to visit any sports website that day in order not to have the results revealed too early (I generally do not watch the events live).

The mindless chatter of radio hosts is still enjoyable for me. After a long day of work, getting to listen to replays of which ever prank call they made in the morning while trying to merge through traffic is a nice way to unwind and begin the evening. Plus I appreciate their small attempts to get community together for events and do ridiculous giveaways.

Jeff Gilbert, of Brain Pain fame, is the only DJ I ever enjoyed listening to. He was always giving away tickets or albums via a contest. One of his contests was "what is your name?" The next week, he announced that was too easy, and he was going to amp it up with "spell your name". His fake commercials were great comedy.

I tracked him down one time, and asked if his shows were recorded. He said nope. I had made a few recordings of his shows, and sadly the rest is surely lost to history.

I can't count the number of times I had to stop in the middle of an interesting NPR story because I'd arrived at my destination and didn't exactly have time to sit around in my car until it ended. I never looked back from podcasts once I got into them.

I have one very good use for analog radio, which is the 50kW AM radio station that does traffic notices in my city every ten minutes. It's often more accurate and better described than looking at red lines on Google maps for traffic jams, and provides other unique local knowledge of construction, temporary detours, etc.

Yeah, I'm not aware of any radio stations near me that feature J-pop and Metal. Before I had a phone playing Spotify, I was burning CDs.

A lot of people say this has nothing to do with it. But for me personally, even when I started watching TV on the computer - which was always a specific Show or Movie, I would still "channel surf" the regular TV as a way to kill time. But once the digital boxes came out in the late 90s/early 00s, it would take 1-2 seconds to switch stations. Longer than I would have been on that station at all while surfing. This completely ruined it for me and I never channel surfed again.

I stopped channel surfing the day we got a digital box. I used to be pretty fast on the remote with the keypad, and could cycle through a number of channels. I forgot how disappointing that digital box was.

I channel surfed right up until getting my first TiVo box (probably around 2002?). That killed it dead for me, by completely changing how I consumed TV (for the better).

I can't channel surf on YouTubeTV because of the UI.

And I could never have been a Dish/DirectTV subscriber because the lag to change channels absolutely kills me.

> Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.

There's a UX lesson here somewhere.

Especially in cars I vastly prefer mechanical controls for things like the stereo.

> Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing.

Frustratingly, my Toyota Corolla will start up the radio immediately, but the on/off/volume control doesn't work for several seconds. If someone in my family left the radio blasting, I'm left mashing the button repeatedly until it kicks in. Ugh.

That's a pain. My VW stereo is similar, but it has a "Maximum start-up volume" setting which gets around this.

When I first moved to Seattle 40 years ago, there was one company that advertised on the radio all the time, The Sxxxx Company (you Seattlites know who that is). Their ads all sounded exactly the same, and I grew to hate TSC. I switched to listening to KNHC which never ran ads because I hated TSC. I stopped listening to the radio entirely when I could play cassettes, and later USB sticks.

Fast forward to today, and I recently bought a streaming radio component for my stereo. I programmed in the local station URLs, turned one on, and was aghast - TSC was still running the same goddamned ads, again and again and again. For 40 years.

So much for streaming Seattle radio stations. Blech.

P.S. You people from California know what I mean. Remember Cal Worthington? He drove me away from watching late night TV. I moved to Seattle to get away from Cal Worthington. Then he opened up a dealership in Seattle. Oh, misery. The DVR kept me out of the insane asylum.

I couldn't stand the Cal Worthington commercials, but I'll remember them fondly because a sweet, elderly neighbor with dementia misunderstood the repeated phrase at the end of the song, and would loudly sing along with some rather improper words that were VERY funny to a kid.

In addition to our friends in the diamond business, we also had Jack Roberts Appliance who was less offensive than the others.

For some reason I never minded Jack Roberts. I can't explain it.

But I dearly loved the old Ivar's commercials. That man knew how to advertise. I'd always go out of my way to eat at Ivar's just because. He was always "fresh" :-)

Rainier Beer also knew how to do ads right. I always picked Rainier because of their amusing commercials.

> When I first moved to Seattle 40 years ago, there was one company that advertised on the radio all the time, The Sxxxx Company (you Seattlites know who that is).

That's the trick. Everyone in the country knows them, but thinks they're local because the ads are so boring. It's a chain!

>Their ads all sounded exactly the same

They aren't the same. Also some of the ads included his daughter too. He seems like a nice guy.

The main "friend" phrase sounds exactly the same as 40 years ago.

I know he sounds like a nice guy. He probably is. But overdoing anything becomes torture after a while. I'll never buy anything from his company, and I won't listen to any radio stations that incessantly run his ads.

The same thing happens when hit radio plays the same hit song 3 times an hour. It isn't long before one starts to hate the song. Decades later, I still hate those songs. I used to like the new "Rasputin" cover. Radio killed it dead for me.

Can you imagine being one of those aging rock bands on tour, and all your fans want to hear are the songs you played 50 years ago? I'd slit my throat.

Let's not forget Vern Fonk insurance.

"Now, you have a friend..."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO....

If the KGB ever needed a false confession from me, they'd know just what to do. I'd fold like a cardboard box left in the rain.

> More generally it seems like when industries are growing, there is competition in this kind of area, but later on this dies off. I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?

This is the natural end result of a totally free market.

Step 1: Competion, therefore consumers are looked after

Step 2: Some companies are "winning" the competition more than others, some of them buy the "losing" companies.

Repeat until there's just one big player and they can charge whatever they want for whatever they can be bothered making available to people.

You have to hope the FTC steps in and stops one company just buying all of its competition forever.

I stopped listening to the radio when I realized I was spending half the time listening to commercials. (99% Commercials are complete mind rot or appeals to emotion btw; if any advertising moguls read this, no one wants to listen to bad jokes and jingles. Just tell me about the product and I might buy it)

The worst are the radio ad with car horns. I'd say they should be illegal but my local police dept is now running anti-DUI ads on the radio complete with 'police are pulling you over' siren blips. So that ship has sailed.

I absolutely hate when I get an ad with a siren or car honk, just makes my anxiety shoot way up. It’s one of the biggest reasons I’ve stopped listening to the radio from time to time. Even if I’m not driving… :/

I wonder how much of this is due to adverts being made for the Company Execs - not for you.

The Company Execs already know the product and don't need to be told about it. But a jingle and a joke might close the advert sale.

EVERYTHING has more latency these days. Phone calls. TVs. Radios. Computer keyboards. PROFESSIONAL WIRELESS MICROPHONE SYSTEMS. It blows!

It really is awful, and it seems like most people just don't care, or don't even know that they could care. Perceived latency was a bit motivation for me to ditch macOS last year and go back to Linux. I haven't got benchmarks to prove how it felt to me, but it felt like everything has become spongy and asynchronous. Even with a decked out iMac and fast SSD, it feel like applications don't launch immediately. There's enough lag time that I sit for a second thinking 'did I double click or not? Did it launch and then crash? Oh, here it comes'. Keyboard input feels laggy.

I hate that more and more things are becoming software controlled. "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" is not a law that I want to apply to machines that can and should continue to function instantaneously.

For an old timer like me, cell phones are about as functional for voice communication as the toy walkie-talkie's were that I played with as a kid.

The sad thing is even a landline isn’t available anymore at my house. It’s a VOIP shitshow

It blows my mind how annoying it is to watch TV nowadays

After the digital TV transition in the U.S. I didn't use my set for a few years since I didn't have a converter and didn't care enough to do anything about it.

One night we were hit with some severe storms and I decided it was worth it to have an antenna and converter for emergencies. Did some research, purchased a box from a friend and a decent antenna, hooked everything up, turned it on, and 5 minutes later tore it all down again.

I'd gone too long without it and lost all tolerance for commercials.

The "free ad-supported television" offerings are actually pretty decent. It's a first-party software profit-center, so the teams making them have every incentive and capability to give them a halfway decent UX. Then on the flip side no-one actually advertises on them, so instead of ad breaks you get 2 minutes of relaxing music and nature montages every 15-ish minutes. Honestly preferable to Netflix's "go-go-go, don't-miss a beat, quick -- next episode is starting!" style.

(My experience is with Vizio's WatchFree+, but the shows are syndicated so I don't think there's much difference from one offering to the next)

When you got to a new town, I seem to recall pulling a booklet out of the glove compartment, finding the right page, finding the right frequency for the station you're after, and tuning manually to that frequency.

"Punch a button" was only an option once you'd already saved that preset - no difference to the later digital version.

Mid-late 90s radios could scan along the spectrum and stop when they found something.

Even some 70's era stereos had that capability -- my grandparents had a mid 1970's Cadillac with an analog tuner, but it also had a button you could press and you could watch the tuning needle scan until it found a a station.

I was looking for a link to one, and it turns out that even some 1950's radios had a "wonderbar" signal seeker:

https://classiccarradiorestoration.com/wonderbar/

This is how my 2007 Japanese car functions and it works just fine. No extra unnecessary features added.

Off by many years. Ford was shipping "electronic" and "premium" radio head units in the 1970s that had electronic tuners with scan and seek functions.

> punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.

I think you're missing the part where the day to day changing conditions mean you have to switch the station then either accept the static or fine tune the station every couple of days. The switching was instant, but I still had to spend time tweaking it and count that as latency-to-ready.

Especially in the cars, without the automatic fine tuning you needed to adjust the frequency depending on where you were at the time.

The way you make money on the way down is different than the way up. Radio was a sleepy backwater medium that was mostly advertising for record companies. When deregulation happened, it became a hot, disruptive market where talk and new music genres grew and grew.

The train slowed down in the late 90s and consolidation of syndication and station ownership picked up. Now a few companies own everything and they’ll pump every dollar until the spectrum is turned over to cellular.

Our first cable TV "remote" was freaking amazing. Similar to this one:

https://www.nj.com/parenting/guest_bloggers/2011/09/the_thin...

Freaking incredible. You could physically switch to any station instantly.

    punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing

The digital-enhanced FM stuff in cars now, like what's being referenced in the article, isn't laggy in my experience. Not quite as instant as a full analog radio, but it's as snappy as any other digital FM tuner dating back to the dawn of digital FM tuners in the 1970s or whatever.

The FM signal is still analog; there's just some digital metadata embedded in it that receivers can optionally demodulate. In my experience the audio starts playing immediately and then the digital metadata (track name, thumbnail) pops up a bit later. So you can still flip through stations with little perceptible lag.

FWIW, I'm the type of guy who keeps CRTs around for his retro systems because he enjoys true zero-lag gaming.

In many areas, the FM signal is digital "HD Radio," which does introduce some lag

Growing up in the 90s my experience was that you turned a knob until you heard what you wanted to hear, and as you traveled you occasionally had to jiggle the knob as the signal shifted. I don't remember any time where a delay was introduced for terrestrial radio.

While I usually don't bother scanning for new stations when I go to a new town, that's because I'm listening to music (or podcasts) with my phone. I don't even listen to broadcast radio in my home town.

About the only time I listen to broadcast radio is in a rental car and that's only because I don't bother pairing my phone with the car unless I'm going to be in it for a few days (and I always unpair and/or reset the pairing settings when I return it).

There was a great period in the mid-late ‘90s where TVs just worked when you connected to cable or antenna, no set top box, tuning was near instantaneous and there was enough enrichment that even station ID and program info could come in with the broadcast.

Pity it was a complicated modulation and waste of spectrum.

I remember those analog tuners and I hated them, you could never get the frequency exactly right and over time it would "wander" so you had to retune. I will take digital FM tuners over analog ones any day, perfect tuning, no wandering, easy channel changing and much better quality.

Also I own a 2012 BMW and its infotainment system works just fine. If the car is coming from deep sleep it takes like 5 seconds to start but it shows the BMW logo and it's a nice touch. With a warm start it's on immediately. Channel changing is also fast, not instant but with the benefit of not hearing any static in between.

Not to say all cars are perfect, I have seen cars with terrible infotainment systems which are slow and buggy, that's just a thing to keep on your list to inspect before buying a new car.

Did they do that in order to make room for the Internet? I assume the channels switched instantaneously because they were broadcasting every single one to your home simultaneously. But maybe they wanted more room on the existing wires to store Internet traffic? So they changed the channel change button to ping a server to ask for the other channel to be broadcast. Could anyone confirm if my understanding is accurate? Either way, it definitely ruined the TV viewing experience. But for the Internet, it was worth it.

Digital over-the-air TV works similarly to analog over-the-air, but it's slower to change channels because the TV has to wait for a frame that isn't a delta from a previous frame to display a coherent image. That's just sort of par for the course with modern digital compression, you could increase the number of such frames but then the compression gets less effective and you'd still have more of a delay than with analog.

Oh I didn't know that over the air TV broadcasts use MPEG. I'm surprised that digital over the air even decodes at all considering how poor I remember the quality being in my childhood. I was referring more to cable.

Digital over the air was better quality than cable in my area for quite a while. I don’t use either now but I think cable was 720 and OTA was 1080.

We're talking about over-the-air radio and tv. There are no wires. Or internet.

> I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline

In all fairness its partly because of the compression algorithms used like Forward Error Correction FEC and progressive frames vs. immediate frames which simply takes some time to construct an audible / visible representation of the digital data.

The degradation in responsiveness happened, but not for the reasons you state. In the 90s and 2000s, consolidation of media company hit a breaking point where one company owns the vast majority of stations in each metro area, they go on commercial at the same time, and you can't surf the way you used to.

It would be very cool to replace the stock radio with a software-defined radio receiver. I really doubt vehicle manufacturers would be interested in offering that, though.

SDR is not really the answer. To make a good radio requires high quality RF filtering, whether it be an SDR or a discrete design. The SDR part only replaces the IF stage and Detector.

If you say so. I'm having a lot of fun with a bottom-dollar setup. There is no perceptible tuning delay and there's a lot of functionality in such a small space. The parent comment was referring to the lack of responsiveness as a result of the digital age, and a lot of the real-time thinking behind SDRs can be applied to take back control and be able to read different competing radio formats and receive on various bands. The problems with the data parsing are sometimes baked in to ICs and software, but the whole idea behind SDRs is to separate the act of receiving radio and decoding it so that there is less friction to changing how it works.

It's also expensive. The infotainment is the gateway to whatever you'd likely want to do and with the emergence of CarPlay and Android Auto, your "radio" is updating constantly.

The actual circuit to make a radio work is also tiny. Some early smartphones included a radio tuner in the hardware.

The problem however is the RF interference generated by the central processor and the display. Adding an AM or FM radio is easy. The hard part is adding the necessary shielding.

Some still do. Recent model Motorolas still sport FM radio functionality

It can't be that expensive. The Pioneer Supertuner III came out in the 1980s and it is considered a state-of-the-art receiver even today. If they could put it in a < $500 head unit 35 years ago, it should cost a nickel today.

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