Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler What just happened???

So we were doing the usual weekend chores and I had the radio radio on in my HT room and another radio on in the great room both set to the same radio station. Everything matched, as one would expect, except for one commercial set. There was one commercial playing in one room and an ad for an entirely different company in the other. Did I mention both receivers were set to the SAME radio station? Neither receiver, to my knowledge, is HD radio capable. Sitting here at the computer I can hear both equally, but it was my wife who noticed and went back and forth a few times before calling my attention to it.

Any thoughts?

Yes, this was before I started drinking...

Scott

Perhaps you've entered The Scary Door.

You just created a new market for Monster: The "Monster Sync Magic" antenna cable that prevents ads from the wrong station to high-jack your listening!
Was it the exact same frequency or is it possible you are in between two local versions of the same station broadcasting at a slightly different frequency and that both radios were set differently?

I know that sometimes when the radio station signal is not strong enough, I would get a kind of cross talk from other stations who have similar broadcast frequencies. Sometimes this cross talk would overlap and I would hear parts of both broadcasts. Other times it would dominate and drown out the other station.

Nope. Both tuners are digital display. One is 15 years older than the other. Both were set to 101.9 out of New Orleans. The AVR's are ~ 60 feet apart on the same floor. The songs were perfectly sync'd and so were half of the commercials for this one set... But there were two commercial slots that didn't even come close to matching. I was dumbfounded enough to not pay attention to exactly which commercials were playing. I wonder if my Emo pre-pro tuner is HD?

Scott

Hi Scott,

I think you're on to the answer. Your new Emo pre/processor tuner is perhaps HD ready. One of the capabilities of the latter is to allow a broadcaster to digitally send out a group of different signals, which the digital tuner will sort out.

When I lived in Toronto, there were early experiments in digital radio broadcasting using a system from Europe. If memory serves, it would enable a broadcaster to multiplex up to 16 different digital signals in the same bandwidth formerly occcupied by a single analog FM radio channel. The system was never adopted in Canada because the US had reserved the frequencies for military use.

Anyway, the current HD radio system in the US is an in-band on-channel, so the digital signal piggybacks on top of the analog FM signal (at a much lower level). If your EMO detected the digital signal, it would switch over from analog to digital. I think it would flag that on the pre-pro's front panel with an icon or something "HD", which might explain the different ad content.

Regards,
Alan

I like how the HD doesn't actually stand for High Definition. Now, it doesn't really stand for anything (like DVD now stands for nothing), but originally it was Hybrid Digital. Because, as Alan said, the digital signal is piggybacked on the analog information.

A friend of mine had the same thing happen with his cable service. He had a cable modem installed, and the company ran a new line just for the computer. Later he put a TV near the computer and just split that one. He noticed that the cable modem line didn't have the local commercials inserted and instead got all national ad, when the other TVs in the house would be playing some cheaply produced ad.

Yeah, Scott; HD is the apparent answer. Of course, now that you're aware of that, you should be tuned to 89.9 instead, to take better advantage of the fact.

As a side note, yesterday when I tuned my squeezebox into a local radio station via iPeng on my iPod Touch, I was pleasantly surprised to see K-Rocks splash page show up in the "now playing" screen on my Touch.

I get impressed by the least important things.....