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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of signature sounds -- many local radio stations (including my local NPR station, KUT) seem to be using some new technology. I frequently hear audio artifacts which sound like a ~1.0-1.5s 'skip-back'. It's like what you imagine something might do if it were streaming the audio and hit a gap/buffer underrun.

This all started in the last 1-2 years. It's not extremely infrequent, I hear these during prime driving times and probably around once/week. I know for sure I have heard it on at least one non-NPR FM station. I wonder anyone else has noticed the same in other markets?

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I have had that happen but I think it was due to switching between the HD and not HD radio signal.

That was my immediate guess as well. I almost always encounter this with music radio stations when I leave my parking garage and the signal flips to HD. With music it’s very easy to hear the quality improvement at the same time as the “skip,” and in my car there’s a little “HD” icon somewhere on the radio interface.

Oh, of course! Yes, that's a great explanation. In that case I wonder if there's latency in the signal -- like the embedded HD content is out of phase with the analog content?

So maybe the problem is really just a defect of my car's radio when toggling.

The digital version is delayed, the station is supposed to delay the analog feed an equal amount so that the transition isn't noticeable. In the early HD radios it was common for it to be way out of sync, but I haven't noticed it much in a long while.

I think there is a little bit. In my car the difference in audio quality is really noticeable but if you don't notice an improvement then you can usually turn the HD part off so you don't have to deal with the frequent switching if it is an issue.

If you have a digital radio receiver in your car, this could be the radio switching between digital and analog.

I heard this with Maine Public Radio a couple of years ago, but actually I have not noticed it lately.

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