That certainly takes care of TV, but we're talking about radio here.
I just called the engineer at our local NPR station, and asked him specifically about a timetable for analog radio conversion, and he said that none exists. If fact, they're just now writing a grant for their HD equipment, and won't have it installed until mid 2009 at the earliest. He's not worried about missing any deadlines.
I asked him about sound quality, and he said that while the HD bandwidth is limited to 96k, it's an AAC stream and thus, just as Apple claims with their iTunes downloads, the sound quality is about twice that of an MP3 at the same bitrate. The problem will be when stations want to run multiple broadcasts and start splitting up the stream. The limit is 96k total, so the quality of each stream will be limited.
There is another station here streaming at 64k AAC+, and it sounds pretty good, not quite the frequency or dynamic range of the analog signal, but quieter, even on a good analog day. If stations will utilize their full bandwidth for one broadcast stream, HD might be pretty palatable. I fear, though, that commerce will win out over quality, and we'll rarely if ever see a full 96k stream.
I also find it interesting that the drop dead date for analog TV is 2/17/09, about a month after Bush leaves office. I predict that the first big act of whoever gets elected will be to stay the FCC mandate, and that analog TV (along with analog radio) will still be alive for a number of years. The marketplace will fix the time of death for analog broadcasting, not the government.
David
