Digital/Analog

[brnt99]

I am a non-technical person but I was wondering--people are worried their analog tuners will be obsolete with the proliferation of digital radio--could there not be a device that somehow converts digital radio signal to analog and then run through a analog tuner?

 

[Whitehall]

The issue is the degradation of the broadcast sound quality. The digital signal from HD Radio is little better, at BEST, than a top MP3 - lots of compression is used. An analogu FM signal can be of very high quality although it is truncated at 15 kHz on the top end.

Hence, converting an HD Radio broadcast to analog is still limited by the original signal content.

 

[Lefty]

I am a non-technical person but I was wondering--people are worried their analog tuners will be obsolete with the proliferation of digital radio--could there not be a device that somehow converts digital radio signal to analog and then run through a analog tuner?

Well certainly there are ways to do that. Once the signal is in a 2 channel lstereo ine level analog audio output one could buy a wireless FM transmitter to reconvert the stereo audio back to a FM signal and then on to ones FM receiver.

However that misses the big picture in that any new 'digital format' that takes over the FM airwaves is going to be in some kind of effecient digital compressed format that will most likely not have the same audio qualities of the better FM broadcasts we now enjoy from some FM stations.

Lefty