Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio!

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Radio Road ] [ Return to Search Results ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

FM is already shifting, but will take longer

Posted by Bambi B (A) on June 12, 2009 at 08:00:44

In Reply to: No analog TV signal anymore... posted by middleground on June 12, 2009 at 05:07:46:

middleground,

I'd been wondering the same thing- what are the plans to change all FM to digital. My theory is that is that consumers will revolt-there are 600,000,000 cars in the World- 280 Million in the US- and that means hundreds of millions of people would have to replace their car radios. When the Television broadcasts went all-digital, though there were already 70 Million in the US with conversion boxes, and the gummint had to issue coupons- this cost $2.3 Billion and apparently panic and unhappiness. FM must certainly be next but, I imagine that if FM were to go all digital, they would have to offer conversion gear and the installation of it probably and that sounds more costly than for TV.

There are Of course, there are digital-satellite receivers, but someone must be working on DAC conversion boxes that would allow someone to detect and convert the digital signal to analogue and input that to an analogue tuner. It's interesting to consider the possibility that digital FM would actually be adding one D/A conversion. Currently, when a station broadcasts a CD, that sound is going through:

Analogue (live sound) > Digital (storage) > conversion to Analogue (create FM signal) > Analogue (detection) > Analogue (amplification)

So, the process of analogue broadcast music heard is : A> D> A> A> A

For digital broadcast it's:

Analogue (live sound) > Digital (storage) > Digital (conversion to FM signal) > Digital detection > Digital (conversion to analogue) > Analogue amplification

which is : A> D> D> D> A> A>

So, there's an extra processing involved, the D to A conversion of the detected digital signal, and I suppose an additional step if the music has to be uncompressed. And that important D/A conversion happens in your tuner instead of at the radio station. This must mean the D/A section of radios will need to be good and probably the era of cheap, reasonable sounding table radios would come to an end. At the low end, the subtraction of so much noise offered by digital may seem to provide a better resulting sound, but, in my view dropouts are more annoying than moderate noise levels.

As for the future of vintage tuners- and this interests me as the owner of 4 of those- I saw in a CES report that there are already $100 mid-fi add-on D> A boxes for tuners and I expect Magnum, Jolida, and other higher end tuner makers will jump into that realm so that for only $800 plus $150 in interconnects you will be allowed to continue to listen to your $1,800 tuner. Since the add on box would have to include the detector, the $1,800 tuner will only be an output stage- one may as well toss it and buy the inevitable Jolida digital tuner with a tube output.

Given that CD's jumped onto the market at double the price of LP's, that CD players still cost plenty to be any good, and now the pending need to buy D> A converters for FM, we can see another example of how digital is making our audio lives so much better!

Cheers,

Bambi B

[ McIntosh MR67, MR77, MX110, Revox B160, Scott 330D, Fisher 800, Marantz 2235, 2275 ]

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

VH Audio

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---