I was reading through some of the reviews on Amazon about the sony HD radio (which apparently stands for Hybrid Digital, not High Definition). Lot's of people there are having
I think the company that developed HD Radio wanted something that said "HD" so people would think it was high definition like with TV. So they picked something that would be abbreviated "HD."
I don't see that it's really a hybrid of anything.
trouble getting decent reception, if any. It seems like a strange idea to have a hybrid tuner that can't make up its mind if it wants to be analog or digital. Is that really how the thing works? (I guess I have to buy one to find out. 
) I don't understand why people want to force the tuner into analog. Wouldn't you just use your regular tuner for analog?
The Sony is both an analog FM tuner and is also capable of receiving HD Radio signals. It is a very capable tuner at both tasks, and just as an analog tuner is better than an awful lot of what have been called "supertuners."
Wayner was correct about some distant stations jumping in and out of HD. I've also found some stations where the analog signal sounds better than the HD one for whatever reason.
I'm guessing that the Sony and other HD tuners, even when they are working in HD (whatever that means), are also plagued with similar digital compression nasties.
Somewhat. It depends upon the station too. Stations can choose how many HD channels to offer. There's only so much data that can be transmitted, so if you divide it up into 2 or 3 channels, each channel is going to be of lower quality than if you used the whole thing for one channel. Unfortunately, it seems that most stations go for quantity rather than quality.
I feel it's a very high-quality tuner at a bargain price, and you don't have to pay a monthly fee to listen to it. As I said some posts back, it has brought back a lot of the fun and excitement of listening to the radio for me.
Satellite radio seems to make some sense for the car, since reception is solid and the ambient noise covers most of the artifacts caused by excessive compression anyway. (The satellite companies also chose quantity over quality.)
Internet radio is good because it lets people run a "radio station" that never could have done that (legally) before. There is a lot of content out there, and some of it is really interesting. I like seeing how other people relate to and think about music, and you get more of that from an amateur station than a polished commercial one.
I would hate to see regular broadcast radio go away, if for no other reason than there are so many radios out there and a lot of people really care for their old radios and tuners. I myself have an old Heathkit table radio that I assembled for my grandmother a long time ago. I inherited it when she passed away. I have it in my kitchen and I like to turn it on sometimes and listen while I'm working in the kitchen. I also have an old GE tube table radio that my parents listened to every morning for decades.
Radio connects me to my past.
There was my first radio of my own that I could listen to in my room. My Dad cobbled together some old stuff he had sitting around, and I had a radio. Twisting that knob and seeing what was out there was a magical experience for a 6 year old.
Or my first portable transistor radio with the little earphone. That got me in trouble in school listening to the ball game. I also wanted to listen to it more than my parents wanted to buy more batteries for me, so I had to ration my use of it.
I didn't get my first FM radio until I was about 13 and had a paper route. FM was a whole different world.
I'm sure a lot of other people feel much the same way about radio.
