I spent about 45 minutes doing Amazon and Google searches, and glancing at Wikipedia articles. I’m out of my depth.
Some things I might sorta know or suspect:
—Many radio station broadcast or will broadcast digital versions of their AM or FM programs — usually tucked onto narrow frequencies very close to their analog frequencies.
—Different countries use different digital broadcast systems. There’s something called DAB. That might be used in Europe. There might be a DAB+.
—The USA might use HD. which might stand for Hybrid Something, rather than High Def.
—There’s a DSP chip that’s used in many digital audio devices; maybe a digital radio needs one?
What I’m afraid of: We’ll order a “digital” radio, and it will just have a digital LED display. Or some other “digital” feature that is not what I need.
What terms should I look for in the product description?
FWIW, my wife mostly wants the radio to listen to baseball games.
Thank you Mr. Martian. I had found that radio by searching for “Digital Radio HD”. But I was confused because the search turned up only three legit radios with HD in the description, all of them Sangeans.
Of course there were 100s more in the search results, with no mention of HD or Digital. Is what I’m looking for really that rare?
Here are two radios that my wife was considering — are they what she believes they are?
HD radio works differently for AM and FM stations.
For AM stations, there is not enough bandwidth for a station’s HD signal to do anything other than retransmit its regular (analog) signal, possibly with better quality. In addition, in the U.S. there are very, very few HD stations on the AM band, since their nighttime signals cause interference to stations on adjacent frequencies.
FM stations have greater bandwidth, which provides a potential for (optional) additional signals. For all FM HD stations, the HD1 signal must duplicate the main (analog) FM programming. This HD1 signal is potentially of higher quality, but has a more limited range than the main FM signal, because it is limited to lower power. An FM station optionally can add a couple additional signals, which to date are generally specialized programming. Only a fairly low percentage of FM stations in the U.S. have adopted HD signals, and many of these only retransmit their main FM programming, and don’t have any additional HD2 and HD3 signals.
As far as I know, all the major league networks are broadcast on basic AM and FM signals, so there is no need to have an HD capable radio.
Nah, she just wants to listen to local broadcasts of the Cardinals, and, I believe, prefers radio to internet streaming. I think she has a friend or client who told her the digital broadcasts were superior.
She has, in the last 20 minutes, ordered the Prunus radio I linked to. I’ve told her there’s a good chance the radio won’t provide digital broadcasts, but it will likely be perfectly serviceable either way.
If the sound is bad she plans to connect a bluetooth transmitter to the jack and listen on one of her nice bluetooth speakers.
I live in St. Louis, listen to the Cardinals, and have two HD radios. There are far fewer HD radios available than when the technology was introduced - it’s just never really caught on. And no, neither of the two radios you linked to are actually HD radios.
As for the Cardinals specifically, yes KMOX does have an HD stream (It’s on KEZK 102.5-2) but if she’s in range of KMOX’s FM translator (98.7) the sound on that is about equal to the HD signal. But having listened on both HD and the streaming app, I’d just go with the app.
A quick search through Amazon tells me Sangean is still making HD radios. Try this one.
