At the spring NAB Show, Ben Barber, president/CEO of Inovonics, will discuss the alignment between analog FM and HD Radio, which he calls a huge concern.
Barber said correct time alignment can take a station (first image) from ±36 samples to ±2 samples.
“The broadcast industry knows that FM/HD1 time alignment is an issue that needs attention, there’s no news there,” he said. “What I will do is explain in engineering terms how time alignment is measured and then corrected. It should be an interesting look under the hood of how the magic happens.”
A common problem, Barber said, is even after you set everything up meticulously, your time and level alignment can still change. He recommends that stations watch for publication of new best practices that are currently under development by an industry technical committee to address this.
Who should attend? “Everyone who has FM/HD Radio on the air or is considering it. Anyone who’s ever wondered how you correlate two audio samples, and then ‘move time’ in a manner that can’t easily be heard, will want to come and listen to this presentation.”
It’s Sunday April 23 at 10:30 a.m. in the Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference.
