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KCRW's HD Radio Odyssey
An interview with Chief Engineer Steve Herbert
By Frank Moldstad
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| Steve Herbert, Chief Engineer for KCRW and sister stations KCRU, KCRY and KCRI |
KCRW, which also was an early adopter of podcasting, began its HD Radio broadcasts in November 2005. It got help from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and iBiquity Corp., which developed the FCC-approved HD Radio technology and licenses it to manufacturers. ?They were very interested in getting some stations out there in what they considered seed markets, the most populous markets,? says Herbert. ?So we were able to take advantage of some initial grant money which came down through Congress and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to make this happen.?
Now the audience for HD Radio is beginning to grow, Herbert notes, as HD Radio sets are starting to trickle into consumer households from brick-and-mortar retailers such as Tweeter and Radio Shack, as well as web retailers such as C. Crane, Crutchfield and Amazon.com. Helping spur interest is an aggressive new ?Discover It!? ad campaign in 50 markets from the HD Radio Alliance, an industry consortium which has pledged to spend $200 million promoting HD Radio in 2006. [For more on HD Radio, go here.]
Still, Herbert is ambivalent regarding KCRW?s experience with HD Radio so far. On the one hand, he?s happy that the station has moved into digital broadcasting because it lays groundwork for the future. ?I think for the industry -- not necessarily public radio, but broadcasting in general and radio specifically -- this is a way to compete with satellite broadcasting. Because who wants to listen to their old analog station when they've got 200 digital channels ahead of them??
| Installation and Logistics |
| Steve Herbert says the gear required for upgrading KCRW and its sister stations to HD Radio varied from station to station. ?In the desert towns [Mojave and Indio], we converted one and bought a new transmitter for the other that is a hybrid, meaning that it generates both the digital and the analog signal on the same box. The LA station and our Oxnard station actually have a separate low-power all-digital transmitter. The LA station feeds a separate antenna that's normally our back up antenna, if you will, on the same site. And the Oxnard signal has a combiner that injects the signal into the main antenna.? Installation of all the components was fairly straightforward, except for a few gotchas. ?The difficult part was, in the traditional method, you're injecting a very low-power signal and combining it into your main antenna. Practically speaking, you're talking 1% of your normal operating power. So, if you have a 100 watt station you're putting in one watt. If you do the math, that kilowatt is 10 W and so on. As a result, there's a lot of wasted energy. Almost 90% gets thrown away in the reject load. So you've got a lot of extra power you're eating up and a lot of heat that's dissipating in a reject load. The early models for doing this were very inefficient, but since that time, the hybrid transmitters solve a lot of that because they're doing the combining internal to the transmitter as opposed to external out in the antenna, so they tend to be a little more efficient.? But the thorniest problem was rather prosaic. The headphone monitoring facility had to be completely overhauled, due to the fact that the analog signal had to be delayed to sync with the digital signal. ?A lot of stations, ours included, like to listen to themselves directly off the air,? Herbert notes. ?And the digital signal is delayed about eight seconds from the analog signal, because it takes that long for the codec to generate the digital signal. So we had to go and delay our analog in order for the blend feature to work. That meant that we could no longer listen to ourselves anymore and had to provide separate processing just for the headphone facility, and delay it appropriately. The logistics of that are just fun if you aren?t already laid out for it, which we weren't. So that's a big operational difference.? Revealing a little insider trivia associated with that, Herbert notes that if a person observes the second hand on a watch, they'll notice the top-of-the-hour network join time is about seven or eight seconds behind real time. |
Herbert concedes that as an audio engineer, he is more sensitive to audio quality than the average person. But in listening to some of the existing HD2 secondary stream broadcasts in the LA market, including those of several Clear Channel stations, he says, ?I can hear it clear as day, particularly up in the high frequencies -- the hi hat and strings area. It just gets kind of strange, there?s sort of a crunchy reverb to it.?
National Public Radio and the radio industry recently conducted some perceptual double-blind tests, which showed that average listeners can?t really hear the difference, however. If anything, they like the HD digital quality better. So, why not go ahead with HD2? It?s partly due to the fact that KCRW?s audience is a little more discerning than the masses. One manufacturer even cajoled Herbert that although the station likes to bill itself as a steak and lobster house, it should face the reality that it?s really in the business of selling hamburgers.
?Which is true for the majority of the industry,? Herbert says. ?But we probably sell tofu chicken or something, I'm not really sure what the right food analogy is for our menu. At any rate, we' re a little bit up from McDonald's, and as a result I'm not ready to give our listeners that quality to give them multiple channels at this point. That was not just my decision, it was a management decision with a lot of input from myself and a few others.?
However, for the industry as a whole, the multicast capabilities of HD2 certainly give the radio equipment manufacturers and broadcasters something they can sell. It?s relatively expensive to add digital HD equipment -- $80,000 to $120,000 for a typical station, more if a higher powered transmitter is required ? and some stations initially found the outlay hard to justify if average listeners may or may not be able to hear the difference. But selling additional channel capabilities that are ?hidden? from those without HD Radio is much easier, and it?s become the driving force behind the new ad campaigns.
In the Los Angeles market, there are some interesting examples of second stream programming, notes Herbert, such as the commercial Classical K Mozart KKGO 1260/540 AM, which is rebroadcasting its adult standards with Gary Owens in the afternoon. Clear Channel?s KBIG-FM is using the HD2 subcarrier as a platform for Disco and Dance hits from the seventies through the present. Another LA Clear Channel outlet, Top 40 station KIIS-FM, is using HD2 for ?Kisspanic? broadcasts. ?Some of the songs are in Spanish, but basically most of the Espaņol part of KIIS is the ID,? quips Herbert.
Ultimately, KCRW will join the fray, adding HD2 streams in the future when some of its quality concerns are addressed. But in the meantime, content is king, Herbert notes, and that?s really what drives listeners. ?If you've got crummy content, people aren't going to want to listen,? he says.
For more information, go to www.kcrw.org.
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