[BC] HDRadio

[WFIFeng@aol.com]

In a message dated 08/04/2006 11:02:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
nakayle at gmail.com writes:

>  Well it is the government that is making their current equipment obsolete.
>  If you were told you can no longer use your TV wouldn't you think you 
should
>  be compensated in some way?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander- they should do the same 
with radios. When IBUZ renders them all useless doorstops, they should make sure 
that a new one will fall into the $10 to $100 price range, just like they do 
right now for analog-ony sets.

(Sarcasm mode: ON)

600 to 800 million radios shouldn't be too difficult to replace, right? 
Deficit? What deficit?

(Sarcasm: OFF.)

The comparsion of rolling-out IBUZ to the roll-out of color TV is invalid, 
because color did not render the existing base of B&W TV's useless... and it 
still took quite a while for it to really "take off". The difference here is that 
the consumer saw an *immediate* and *very desirable* benefit to spending the 
money on the upgrade! Not so with IBUZ. The advantage is dubious at best... 
potentially confusing and rather expensive at worst. The RIAA is certainly going 
to utterly stifle the one "feature" that *might* have been desirable: 
Direct-to-digital recordings. Don't count on seeing a data port on any of the 
yet-to-be-released IBUZ radios.

Despite reasonably-priced and relatively abundant receivers, AM Stereo 
suffered because people just didn't see enough of a cost/benefit ratio. IOW, not 
enough of the "What's in it for me?" factor. (Plus the "platform motion" 
nightmare.) That's why there are many of us here who think IBUZ will be like the 
Emporer's New Clothes. Tinkerers will one day have a whole bunch of "surplus" 
digital gear to play with, I suspect.

It seems that the deep-pocket station owners are having little problem 
shelling-out gobs of money for this flawed thing... why not eliminate the LOW VHF TV 
band, expand the FM dial downward, and *auction* those as *all-digital* 
channels? Seeing how the money is flowing so freely with IBUZ... Uncle Sam should 
be able to make quite a bit on it, and we might actually wind-up with a more 
viable, workable system? Hundreds of millions of radios *won't* become obsolete, 
and the present interference problems won't exist. Stations that already have 
the FM IBUZ system can even re-tune and reuse it in it's highly-touted 
"all-digital" mode! AM's... well, this thing should have never even been attempted 
on the MW band. Let 'em bid on the new freq's, then they can turn-in their IBUZ 
gear and exchange it for an ex-band FM rig.

Willie...