good old tuners going obsolete

I'm not arguing that digital's not coming - it's already here. I'm just trying to get clarification on this supposed 2009 "deadline". So far, you haven't cited a single piece of evidence for it, and all the evidence I've found refutes it. If Congress passed a law, surely you can find some reference and point me to it. I'm sure others reading this thread would be interested too.

Here is a start for you with the link below if you want to search further. I will also do some research on the raroi end of it. I myself hope they keep brodcasting my favorite analog station for years!

FCC tuner mandate: You may have heard that all TVs will have to be HDTVs by a certain date. That's not technically correct. The FCC has mandated that as of March 1, 2007, all new TV and video products imported into the U.S. or shipped to retailers that include an analog (NTSC) tuner need to have a digital ATSC tuner as well. There's a loophole though: if the product contains no tuner whatsoever--for TVs, this means it's a "monitor"--then the mandate does not apply. As a result of the mandate, nearly all televisions sold after that date should be ready for the analog switch-off.

Analog TV broadcast switch-off: In December 2005, the Senate passed a budget bill that calls for over-the-air television stations to cease their analog broadcasts by February 17, 2009. After that date, TVs and other gear with old-style NTSC tuners will be incapable of receiving over-the-air broadcasts. Part of the government's quandary is that the switch-off would cause thousands of TVs to go dark and would deprive many lower-income viewers of their only source of television. To address this issue, lawmakers propose to subsidize converter boxes that would allow people to watch the new digital broadcasts on their old analog TVs. The subsidy currently calls for $40 coupons to be given to households who want to buy the estimated $50 to $70 boxes. Given the slow progress over the last nine years since the introduction of digital and HDTV, we wouldn't be surprised to hear of more changes before 2009.

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-7608_7-1016109-3.html

I believe I was the first to post here on Audiogon about so-called HD RADIO. The first responses were that I was joking.

Then, someone posted a link to the folks who had gotten FCC clearance to develop the standards for this new product. This person, as I recall, worked for the company.

I then watched as the first receivers, Pioneer I believe, for automobiles came into the market. I even traced down an outlet that had a demonstration of the two(!) radio stations then broadcasting in 'HD' in my major metropolitan area.

The first in-home receivers came from DAYSEGUERRA, which was really a high-end studio monitor built for the stations broadcasting in HD. Since then a few others, like Audio Design Associates (www.ada-usa.com) entered the high-end market and now I believe Cambridge Soundworks has a product.

As close as I have followed this, I have opted to go digital, but not OTA(off the air). As I have recently posted elsewhere I had the opportunity to visit slimdevices and I purchased the TRANSPORTER which they featured at an open house. The Transporter was back-ordered so they gave me a squeezebox to tide me over.

The Transporter has a high-end DAC made for internet streaming audio and it interfaces real well with my Apple Computer. Almost my entire most often played library of CDs is now on my computer and this device is all I could have hoped for. As I live on the West Coast I can tune into late-night East Coast stations to pick-up their late night feeds that are pretty much chatter and commercial-free.

I do believe that internet radio will out compete the so-called HD Radio, at lest in the home environment which is why even the manufacturers have invested so much into automobile units.

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

Is there anything on the radio worth listening to? I live in the NY metro area and frankly, it seems like a wasteland....