[BC] IBUZ Perfection

[Rich Wood]

------ At 09:03 PM 1/7/2006, cld at admin.umass.edu wrote: -------

>I have to plead ignorance. Where I am, I cannot hear the HD sidebands very
>well on WOR or BZ. But I was out at the Cape for a spell yesterday 
>and listened
>to WBUR AM on 1240. OHMAGAWD. I can't believe any AM station would allow that.
>The digital was all over 1230 and up to 1260 on my stock Plymouth radio.
>But with that said- I just was very surprised how loud the digital was on-
>channel. Perhaps my radio has a little wider bandwidth than many (I would
>guess it's good to 4 or maybe 4.5kc), but it was very noticable and annoying.

You can't use your radio as an excuse. There are simply too many of 
them that respond the same way. In my mind, it's simply bad 
engineering to allow a signal to be polluted that way. Even if you 
ignore the effects on listenership, it's hard for me to understand 
how engineers can accept and make excuses for what I hear - for what 
many of us here hear. As more stations install the hash generators 
the worse the band will become. It doesn't take exotic, expensive 
equipment to see how the AM band, and, possibly, the FM band will 
suffer in an effort to join some mythical revolution.

I honestly hope that nighttime IBUZ operation will be authorized soon 
enough to prevent complete destruction. The grand HD Dominion was 
created to obscure the serious technical issues. Will $200 million in 
promotion money make the technical issues either go away or become 
palatable to listeners? How many engineers are members? The names I 
see are sales and Wall Street-driven executives without a technical 
clue. That, in itself, is strange to me, since these are the people 
who stand to lose the most from bad technology. Of course, most of 
them will have been fired long before analog goes away. They'll just 
get too old (more than 40) to be relevant to whatever generation is 
ready to pop up. Most are there, already. They'll be fired by a new 
20-something boss.

 From a programming standpoint, I believe it'll kill AM. The jury is 
still very out on what effect the artifacts on FM will have on TSL. 
We won't know that until receivers are replaced. I suspect that those 
who went to CES will come away with the feeling this is feeble 
technology that will be replaced well before it finds its market by 
something far less destructive.

>No one in their right mind would allow for a ground loop of that amplitude.
>I know this has been said before. This is one man's opinion and I certainly
>was surprised.

I spent a couple of months with an IBUZ receiver. It ain't no 
revolution. As you discovered, a simple AM radio is all you need to 
prove it doesn't work well.

>  Rich- perhaps I'll hold on the t-shirt.

At this point a hairshirt is more appropriate.

Rich