Belar Electronics Laboratory has announced what it calls a “simple and cost-effective way for radio broadcasters to eliminate delay between digital and analog signals on the fringes of HD Radio coverage” — Automatic Delay Correction. The company explains, “This ensures a pleasant listening experience for audiences in areas where HD Radio coverage is less robust, seamlessly switching back and forth between the two programs without audience detection.”
ADC is an algorithm to be used in the Belar FMHD-1 HD Radio-capable modulation monitor. The algorithm constantly monitors the HD Radio stream and the analog stream, comparing them. It is capable of then adjusting the streams and delivering the corrections to a processor, delay or exporter further upstream in the program air chain.
Belar CEO Mark Grant said, “Every HD Radio broadcaster already has a delay line built into the air chain, whether it’s through the leading audio processors on the market or within a current generation exporter … We are removing an unnecessary step by feeding the signal back to the processor or exporter. Our modulation monitors require only a simple software upgrade in the field, ensuring that broadcasters can seamlessly incorporate time alignment without significant costs or complexity.”
Belar will demonstrate Automatic Delay Correction in its booth, C2452, at the NAB Show.
In related news, Wheatstone has announced that Belar’s Automatic Delay Correction technology will be supported by Wheatstone’s Automatic Control Interface in concert with the Wheatstone processors such as the FM-55 and AirAura. The company plans a demonstration of that at its NAB Show booth, C755.
Wheatstone Senior Product Design Engineer Jeff Keith said, “By not modifying the existing [physical] air chain we can keep the signal path pure and simply tell the processor what the perfect diversity delay setting should be. Because all of our on-air processors already have the ACI protocol built in, a simple software upgrade opens up access to the HD diversity delay being controlled by the Belar FMHD-1.”
