laptops with 1200 vertical resolution - going off topic into analogue/digital broadcasting

[Tim]

On Sat, 2013-01-05 at 14:54 -0500, Eddie G. O'Connor Jr. wrote:
> is there REALLY such a thing as "HD RADIO"?.....as I've heard some
> stations proclaiming?

Dunno, digital radio hasn't taken off, here, either.  The receivers are
very expensive, all portable ones only have a mono speaker, the battery
life is very short, reception is lousy.  And, unlike analogue, where
reception just gets noisier with distance, digital radio goes like
mobile phones, where the audio just cuts out every fraction of a second,
or completely dies.

Traditional analogue radio and TV has less than HiFi reproduction.  It's
only 15 Hz to 15 kHz, whereas HiFi usually is 20 Hz to 20 kHz.  It's
easier to manage a narrower bandwidth, most older people can't hear much
beyond the narrower bandwidth, and most people (of any age) don't hear
the full bandwidth when in a noisy environment, anyway (listening to the
radio in the car, or TV in the home).  And there's very little dynamic
range (the ratio between quietest and loudest sounds has been squashed
together), with the stations doing this for ease of listening in a noisy
environment (make the quiet sounds louder, and squash all the louder
sounds down to similarly loud levels - notice how a whisper, normal
speach, and a yell are all strangely similar in volume, on TV), and as a
way of dealing with electrical noise on the sound (make everything
louder than the hiss of the noise floor).

Digital radio has the ability to improve on this, to sound even better
than compact audio discs:  Have a wider bandwidth, because it can handle
it (the analogue transmitter constraints don't apply.  And the ability
to handle a full dynamic range, allowing the receiver to be adjusted to
provide compression where it's useful (e.g. the radio in the car), or
none where it's actually a nuisance (e.g. the music lover listening to a
concert in their lounge, without any kids making a ruckus in the room).
But suffers immensely from the heavy data compression being applied to
the stream, as stations try to squeeze umpteen stations into the same
radio bandwidth.  Never mind the reception issues, digital radio is
often worse in audio quality than analogue.

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