“I’d like to call upon our industry to rally on behalf of HD radio. Yes, right now it’s dead in the water. The only way it’ll take off is if the automotive industry equips their radio platforms with HD radio as standard equipment and even then critical mass would be at least five years away.”
I can remember seeing after-market FM receivers for cars as early as 1960. Yet, according to Arbitron, FM didn’t overtake AM in aggregate listening nationally until the spring of 1978. Yes, FM receivers had become standard in a few luxury cars in the early 1970s, but it remained an option in mid- and low-end vehicles until the later Seventies.
Even so, the nation’s rolling stock isn’t replaced that quickly, and consumers are holding onto their cars longer than ever in this economy. What allowed FM to make that progress was a healthy market for after-market car sound systems. In 1978, nearly half the vehicles on the road with FM had after-market units. In today’s cars, the radio is often integrated into a complex electronic system and not easy to replace. So that kind of listener base won’t be available. Why not?
Baby boomers, who were young then, and who had embraced the “underground rock” FM stations of the late 1960s, were the major customer base for after-market car sound. Where’s the comparable inducement for today’s younger demos?
And sound quality isn’t the answer. First, this is a generation that has embraced the MP3 format. And second, contrary to the industry’s party line, HD is anything but high-def. At best, the FM version sounds like a decent, but not outstanding web stream, and the AM version sounds like what would have been considered mediocre web audio in the 1990s.
So why is Tom Kent shilling for this debacle?
CBS, the biggest supporter of Iniquity Digital Corporation’s Rube Goldberg version of digital radio, owns some of the biggest stations carrying Tom Kent. That no doubt has something to do with his apparent enthusiasm.
