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Comment by rplst8 | Hacker News Reader

> I suppose long term FM is dead, but meanwhile it has its uses.

If true, this is really unfortunate. I've written about this before, but FM is a really great technology, and in a lot of ways it's only suffering because of the content. The sound quality of digital "equivalents" (XM Radio, HD Radio, Internet Radio, etc.) doesn't even come close to a clear FM station.

Not to mention there are millions of vintage radios that still work perfectly today with this technology.

For being invented in 1933 it's pretty amazing.

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HD Radio really grinds my gears. They hijacked the HD acronym for marketing: it stands for Hybrid Digital. As you mention the quality is not comparable when you have a strong analog FM signal.

On top of that the encoding is proprietary and one company holds the IP for the codecs. I can't believe the FCC allowed it to become a "standard".

It's only saving grace is that works alongside existing FM without much intrusion into the way FM already works.

As an aside, I got a free SiriusXM trial with my new car, and the sound quality is terrible compared to FM. I was honestly reminded of the MP3s I got from Kazaa and burned to a CD in 2003, you can hear the aggressive compression.

I have knowledge of the bitrate at which Sirius transmits, and while it varies by station, 32/kbs is (or was) typical.

It's why I dumped Sirius a while back. When it started, Sirius had really good quality. IIRC, I'd put it up there with CDs. As they added more and more, the quality just kept going down and down. Between the nosedive in quality and the increasing number of ads on non-music channels, I didn't see $12/month in value. IOW, satellite radio went through the exact same cycle as cable TV.

It seems like it really varies between channels, especially between talk and music but also within categories. I assume they allocate more bandwidth to the more popular/lucrative channels. I find the quality to be fine on the ones I listen to (e.g. SiriusXMU).

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