Review: Radiosophy HD100

NEXT GENERATION HD RADIO

December 2007 By Grant Clauser

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HD Radio, the technology pioneered by Ibiquity Corp. as a replacement for traditional analog radio broadcasts, has started off a little slow in its attempt to win over the hearts and wallets of radio listeners. Satellite radio, from companies like XM and Sirius, have done much better, but have had a little head start. It’s easy to understand the attraction of satellite radio—good sound quality, great variety, and nearly no commercials. HD Radio’s benefits though can be a little harder to explain to people—better sound quality, some additional channels. But then there’s the Ah ha! Because HD Radio is free.

Well, sort of. Up until recently, HD Radios were expensive. Six months ago you would not be able to find an HD radio for under $200. The HD100 from Radiosophy finally gets it under the $100 mark (by a penny).

First the HD Radio primer—this is AM and FM radio broadcast digitally. At one level, it’s just the same old content you currently get from any radio, but being digital, there’s no noise, static or other analog junk in the signal. The stations sound a whole lot better. Additionally, being digital, broadcasters can send multiple channels in the same space they would have previously sent only one (called multicasting). Through multicasting, instead of one station at 91FM you may get three. The additional stations—for the broadcasters who are taking advantage of it—tend to be variations on the first. For example, my favorite all-day classical station turns to all jazz at night. Its new multicast station is all jazz during the day and all classical at night—and I get this free just like regular FM. Similar to satellite radios, you can also view artist, track or station name info on the radio’s screen, but not all stations send that info out on their signal.

The HD100 does all that. It’s an AM/FM/HD radio capable of picking up multicast signals (not all early HD radios could) and it displays whatever on-screen info the station sends along.

From my 12th floor office in Philadelphia I was able to pull in more than a dozen HD signals (plus their analog sisters of course) with the Radiosophy. If you want to be a purist, you can set it to scan just for HD signals. A little blue light pops on when it locks in on a digital station, and pressing the enter button allows you to cycle through the on-screen display options (artist, track, station). If the digital signal isn’t strong enough for the radio to lock onto, it will fall back to the analog signal.

The HD radio stations sound quite a lot better than their analog counterparts. The signal is cleaner, without any background noise interfering. The HD100 is also a pretty decent analog radio as well, and pulled in a couple of FM stations I couldn’t get in with my other office radio. While the HD stations sounded good, they didn’t sound quite as good as through other HD radios—namely the Cambridge Soundworks 820HD I reviewed earlier this year, but that radio carries a list price $200 more than the Radiosophy.

At a time when you can get a Sony alarm clock radio for $20 at Target, $100 for the HD100 doesn’t sound cheap—but any other HD Radio will set you back considerably more. As of this fall, about 1,200 stations are broadcasting digitally, and many of them are sending out multicast signals, so the only way you can pick up that extra content is to buy an HD radio, and this unit is the easiest way to achieve that. yy

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