Hacker News Reader

Comment by rplst8 | Hacker News Reader

Getting rid of these older analog radio technologies is short-sighted unless there is a real compelling and complete replacement already cheap and widely available.

FM (and AM) radio are great technologies. Just because they are "old" doesn't mean there is something better.

In the US, Internet streaming (of existing stations), digital HD radio, and XM satellite rarely achieves a fidelity that equals FM (when the FM reception is clear). All of them suffer from unpleasant distortion. FM is not without it's warts, but the "errors" are less distracting IMO. They also all suffer from binary operation. They either work or they don't. FM fails somewhat gracefully in that the signal just gets noisier the further from the source you are.

View on HN

Right, there are basically two things I listen to in my car these days. Music or podcasts coming off of my phone, and FM radio news. But other than that, poor industry choices killed FM years ago as a viable place to find anything worth listening to.

In my market, Clearchannel and friends pretty much screwed up the music stations and nobody listens to them by choice. They either played the same tired songs over and over, pumped so many commercials into their broadcast there was effectively nothing to listen to (and coordinated commercial breaks between various stations so there was no reason to switch) or "changed the format" of popular stations without warning or alternative, wiping out decades of legacy.

I remember when it happened with one of the most popular and historic stations in the D.C. Baltimore area, WHFS. I was driving to lunch, jamming out to some great music, they cut to a commercial break and the commercials suddenly started talking about the latest Latin American bands. I ignored it, until about 10 minutes later when I realized this was no longer a commercial, but the broadcast!

According to WP, the station's staff didn't even know about the switch until about an hour before it happened.

AOL, despite all the bad things you can say about them, was headquartered in the same market, and ran a large-ish (at the time) internet radio system. They ended up launching a streaming radio station with pretty much the same format. But HFS was gone.

The local alt/prog rock music market has never recovered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHFS_(historic)

I've tried to listen to music radio recently, and I think during my hour long commute, I encountered maybe 4 songs, the entire rest of the drive was absolutely packed with commercials and station filler. I also found that stations try to coordinate their commercial breaks with each other, when one goes on break, good luck finding another station of any genre that's not on break. And the breaks go on for 15-20 minutes. It's just unlistenable.

Supposedly, everybody is broadcasting better things on HD radio, but I'm not even sure if new cars I'd by support HD radio, they only advertise XM.

Make a playlist on Spotify. They are actually not bad at suggesting reasonably similar artists and that way you get all songs and no filler.

Nobody has time to make playlists, that's why they use radio.

I think HD support is now just a given, they don't bother mentioning it.

I also feel FM is a superior format to HD in most cases. The compression required by digital to fit into the spectrum is just too excessive for my taste. The only reason the stations are into it is so that they can sell the same commercial time multiple times for each of their digital sub-stations.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, HD radio can transmit up to 300kbps, which is more than enough for extremely high quality sound. If quality is worse it's because stations are choosing to trade off quality for more channels, not because the technology forces it.

They do, they usually jam on several subchannels so the quality is nothing special. Plus, if the signal drops a bit you get stuttering/drop outs/desyncs, not graceful degredation.

I also think the 300 kbps rate is limited if they continue to broadcast the analog signal as well.

I suspect what's actually happening is that they are playing lowest-common-denominator music, which few people are thrilled by, but which more people are interested enough in to stay listening to.

Put differently, there are lots of people that might listen to Latin American music, and very few of us who listen to prog rock. Prog is actively repellent to ~90% of people.

This is a common argument but the numbers don't back it. Radio station listenership had tanked and market penetration of pop music with respect to total sales volume is going down. The most popular song rarely constitutes over 0.5% of sales for a given week. The only growth segments I read about are for NPR and non commercial stations.

The real idea is that they want the most cheap to produce, easiest to sell commercial on format. I don't believe that they care much about who listens to it.

Yeah, I agree, large media companies have tried to commoditize music and chase profits by squeezing blood out of the stone they've created. But like the sibling commont by kristopolous points out, ratings have absolutely tanked, and I personally believe it's because even lowest common listeners want to hear something other than commercials or the same 3 songs all day.

Even people who like Taco Bell don't eat it every meal.

I think a more challenging problem is that with radio rapidly dying, the music publishers still act like they're the prime advertising medium, and that online streamers should be brought in line with the traditional radio model. The industry is a mess and I can't help keep thinking that it's because they brought it on themselves.

The noncommercial band of the FM dial is a godsend-- college and community radio stations exist in nearly every city, and serve a very special niche in allowing human-curated broadcasts to exist. (No commercials, no repetition)

I'm perhaps a bit biased-- I work as a program director for one of the bay area noncommercial stations (KZSU, 90.1 FM), and help with the Soundtap project.[1]

[1] http://soundtap.com/

Soundtap is awesome, thanks

> And the breaks go on for 15-20 minutes. It's just unlistenable.

In that case, which losers are paying for these ads?

I've driven in quite a few remote locations in Norway, and it's very rare not to have a 3g or at least an edge connection. I can stream music no problem while driving over the mountain between east and west (over Haukeli). Trying to listen to FM in these areas is a test of patience at best.

Moving to use DAB is a mistake though, they should just remove them all and rely on regular internet transport.

What's the cost of listening to FM versus having a 3G connection with no data cap for music streaming in Norway?

Whatever it is, now add the cost of 3G when traveling into another country in Europe with your car.

Plus the hassle of obtaining a new radio to an old car, so that you can plug your 3G phone to it. (At least around here, most car radios do not even have an input where you could plug your phone's earphone output, and even in 10-year-old cars the radio is an integrated model which is not at all easy to replace.)

Depends on whether you need a separate carrier plan just for that. Most people already have a decent, unlimited data plan on their mobiles, which at least in Finland start from 5€/month. Although, that only buys you 0.5Mbits connection, so upgrading to 10€ plan for 2Mbits might be required. On the other hand, a separate SIM with no calling or SMS functionality will get you 10Mbits for 10€/month.

I'm paying 300 NOK(€36) for a 5000 MB/unlimited call/sms/mms within the nordic countries. The 1000 MB package is 200 NOK(€24). Which is again paid for by my job, but many more have this option than a FM receiver without switching equipment or plan.

I have yet to exceed the 5000 MB limit, but the provider I use also have a 8000 MB option for another 100 NOK.

In comparison, if you order a beer in Oslo you will probably pay 90 NOK for half a liter.

In some situation Netcom (TeliaSonera) does not charge your datacap if you use Spotify bundled with the plan.

"Just because they are "old" doesn't mean there is something better."

Nobody has claimed this, so why are you arguing against it? You've pretended someone has claimed something, and then you argue against that rather than the actual arguments made. This is called a 'straw-man'.

You're like a lunatic, arguing against an imaginary person.

if you read the article, you'd see that norway is trying to replace fm with digital radio

I have read the article. Nowhere does it claim that the reason for this is that FM is simply "old". They believe that DAB is better for particular reasons - choice, they want to reclaim the bandwidth etc. You disagree with that, but it has nothing to do with simply the age of FM.

Nobody has argued that the reason they want to replace FM is that it is old. So why challenge that argument?

Just a reminder: there's a new rule to avoid gratuitous negativity in posts. Some of your wording comes across pretty harshly.

source: http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline

Trying to shut down discussion by abusing that rule is a terrible thing to do.

I'm not trying to silence anyone, I'd just rather people avoid calling others lunatics.

> unless there is a real compelling and complete replacement already cheap and widely available.

"Thursday, the Ministry of Culture announced a national FM-switch off, to complete the transition to digital radio."

Does DAB not count ?

As discussed further in the comments below:

DAB typically serves minimal quality (is bandwidth inefficient), often picks up interference from LEDs/modern lightbulbs/low voltage circuits, and receivers are costly, people don't have them, and they use significantly more power than FM.

Interesting. One of the claimed advantages of DAB(+) is that the transmitters use less power. But if that happens by offloading the energy use onto the receivers, that may not be a wise choice.

The worst thing about DAB is how stupid the DAB manufacturers have been prioritizing. 95% of all DAB radios you can buy are $50 plastic piece-of-shit-speakers stuff that you have in your kitchen or bathroom. Even if DAB(+) were to offer better sound quality than FM, you wouldn't be able to discern it. Adding insult to injury, a radio in a fixed location with good wifi coverage doesn't need any of the technical innovations in DAB wrt. elimination of multipath interference etc.

XM is pretty awful, mostly as an artifact of the number of channels they chose to cram into the system.

I was once privy to a document that showed how the 1.5Mbit stream was divided up into the channels. Some of the "better" channels got less than 32kbit/sec.

The whole stream (all channels combined) is only 1.5Mbps? Yikes. I knew it was bad - but not that bad.

I reluctantly pay for XM. I enjoy some of the talk radio stations, but the music quality is sub-par. That said, if I had a $1 for every person that said they loved XM and thought it sounded great, I could buy... well not much but many people I've talked to think the SQ is great.

I think it's worse than: CDs, MP3s over 128kbps, cassette tapes, vinyl records, 8 tracks, and FM. They only think that it's maybe better than in terms of SQ is AM radio, but it still suffers from loads of high frequency distortion that is maddening - especially if you have a high end car stereo. AM doesn't try to be something it's not - there is a roll off starting around 4 kHz, but it's fine for talk radio and music just sounds dull, which is fine. XM sounds "bright" in that it has HF content, but it's distorted and "warbley" for lack of a better word. It sounds like the the HF is passed through a filter of moving water or a fan or something.

I don't recall if it was 1.5mbit for both ensembles or if it was 1.5mbit each (there are actually two data streams that are broadcast by the two satellites to give redundancy and time/space diversity). There's also forward error correction built into the data.

The "warbly" stuff is the artifacing in the AAC decoder. That's how compressed the stuff is. I can hear it and it drives me nuts. Many can't.

Protip: two of the best quality channels are the Preview channel (of course) and the classical music one.

HD radio in the U.S. was a classic screw-up. It is one of the few cases where the europeans got it right and we blew it.

The DTB standard in Europe advanced the possibilities of radio whereas HD Radio was something that was a sideshow to the failing FM radio business.

Is there something the US did right which Europe did not? Not sure what that might be. The VSB TV standard here is junk compared to DVB. We're stuck with VSB, because the incumbent broadcasters couldn't see past the few years of the transition period. And it didn't solve the co-channel interference, anyway.

Good luck getting people here to believe that. This is a site full of people who think that programmers are engineers.

Ok, I'll bite. Tell me the differences, besides "engineers build things while programmers write software". Honest question on my part.

"Engineer" implies someone who has completed study and passed objective evaluations of competency, as well as licensure to practice their profession.

This could easily be the case for software engineers too, if we didn't abdicate the power to judge competency to employers and vendor certifications.

Of course all established engineering fields are incredibly narrow compared to the scope of what software might conceivably do. There are simply no definitions of software fields that have the rigor for such objective evaluations and licensure. And there probably never will be given that the substrate of physical engineering is physical matter with unchanging properties whereas with software it's a ponderous stack of man-made abstractions.

It doesn't mean that programming is in any less need of rigor or that it is any easier than any other form of engineering at scale.

Only in some countries. In others, anyone can profess to be an engineer.

You realize that in most US states, software engineers can now sit for a PE license in software engineering, right? This has been possible in a few states since 2012, when the NCEES started offering the PE license exam in software engineering.

This is the same license that electrical, mechanical, structural engineers get, with the same initial Fundamentals of Engineering exam followed by the subject matter (P&P) exam (usually after verification of a certain amount of experience).

And, if they're Americans, they'll be taking the exam, as opposed to sitting for it, or writing it. (After all, professors or other entities write exams. The whole point is that the students didn't write it, or else they'd know all the answers, now wouldn't they?)

haha

The basis of engineering for the last two decades has been mountains of Matlab code, among other things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com