Yesterday I got curious about HD Radio so I pulled up the Wikipedia page on it. It turns out HD Radio a proprietary mess. Standard-owner iBiquity could’ve used one of the dozens of openly-available CODECs to create HD Radio (and the FCC could’ve mandated it) but instead it hacked the MPEG4-AAC standard into something proprietary. In the long run, this will set back American radio innovation as compared to Europe’s open standards-based approach. What a shame.
The end result is that radio manufacturers have to pay a royalty to make HD radio receivers. Station owners pay a large fee for the encoder and sign away 3% of their net profits. All of this is for a digital format with a nascent, unproven audience.
Looking to Raleigh’s leader in broadcast advancements, Capitol Broadcasting, I clicked on WRAL-FM’s homepage and found a link to listen online to the station’s HD broadcast. An Adobe Flash-based player instantly launched, streaming a nice mix of music with apparently no commercials. Quite nice!
A little further hacking gave me a URL that would let me skip the necessity of Flash. This would allow me to listen to WRALFM-HD2 on my smartphone because my Android-based Virgin Mobile phone does not support Flash. This would allow me to listen to the station in my car and bypass the need to buy a proprietary, expensive HD Radio receiver.
Unfortunately for me, not only does my smartphone not support Flash, it also does not support AAC streams, apparently. That let me to discover another URL that streams an MP3 format. The MP3 stream has a lowly 22KHz sound quality, which is disappointing, but at least I can listen to HD anywhere I go now. Hopefully, Capitol will see fit to upgrade this stream to a higher-bitrate MP3 format, or perhaps add an Ogg Vorbis stream – which is not only free but sounds fantastic at low bitrates.