I recevied an email yesterday from a member of the Intel "Platform Architecture" area asking about my definition of HD Audio. As you may or may not know, Intel is very big in this space and if you google HD Audio you will get a whole lot of search results that point to them. However, there seems to be some imprecision as to the definition of HD as it applied to audio. I thought it might be useful to express my frustration with the terminology and application of HD as I currently see it.
FIrst let me ask a question? What does "HD Radio" stand for? If you answered that it mean "High Defintion" radio, I would not be surprized. The good folks behind this technology [iBiquity] want you and I to believe that there are delivering a completely revolutionary form of radio that is capable of high definition. It is most definitely not high definition...or even close. The digital sidebands that they use to create KLOS-1 and/or KLOS-2 along side there main analog transmission are created from a digital bandwidth of 96 kbps [kilo bits per second]. They do use a new codec to improve the quality of the audio but the quality of the signal is barely as good as the worst quality MP3 download that you can get from Napster or iTunes. Even if you grant them the possibility that the music is "CD Quality", that stills falls far short of the new high definition or high resolution standards.
So I would ask of anyone that trips across this blog. What is HD Audio? I'll give my take on the definition in the next post.
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