Hands-on Review: HD Radio

Most of us are familiar with the satellite digital radio offerings from Sirius and XM.

But there's a whole other world of free digital radio that lives in the airways. HD radio is a digital broadcast transmitted by FM and AM radio stations around the country. The stations use their existing radio spectrum to transmit the digital signal. Their radio towers have been retrofitted with special transmitters that add the digital content to the existing signal. All you need is the HD radio receiver. And there's no subscription fee.

I've written about the pros and cons of satellite versus HD radio before, but I finally got to play with the new tabletop HD Accurian Radio, a $199 tabletop radio sold at RadioShack. (Accurian is RadioShack's house brand name.)

The Accurian looks a bit sexier than most tabletop radios, and it sounds quite good for a tabletop radio. It's incredibly simple because it works very much like its analog counterpart. But simplicity has its cost. There's a built-in clock, but no alarm, and there's a credit card-sized remote that I'm bound to misplace in a few moments.

According to HDRadio.com, there are more than 900 stations across the United States that are broadcasting in HD, but New York is not the HD radio Mecca.

Along with the signal, HD radio can provide song content info (similar to XM and Sirius) that scrolls on the radio display, but in our scan of NYC HD stations, only one station was providing that enhanced content. The radio also plays regular FM stations, but I know there are digital stations in NYC that it's not picking up. I think it needs a strong signal, and in New York City, obstructions make that tough.

The speakers sound good, but they are, after all, just tabletop radio speakers. Mysteriously, the radio has an AUX in so you can hook up a music player or other sound source, but has no AUX output that would enable you to feed the signal to a home stereo system. So your sound experience is sort of limited to tabletop radio. My favorite radio station in NYC is WFUV, and I know that they broadcast in HD, but the station can't be found on the Accurian.

One good thing is that most of the HD radio stations are multicasting, so I have a wider choice of programming. It's as if there were suddenly twice as many stations on the FM dial. For example, WNYC2 is the second HD channel of our local public radio station. It plays "classical music 24/7," whereas the main WNYC channel is a mix of talk and music.

Here in New York, the country's largest market, there are about a dozen stations broadcasting in HD; since most of those also broadcast on their second channel, we have the potential for about two dozen choices. But the rub is that the signals aren't all strong enough to be received in HD, and many of those channels are similar formats, which further reduces the selection. This pales in comparison to, say, XM Radio's 150 channels, which has an oldies channel for each of the last few decades, multiple jazz channels, multiple urban channels, multiple rock channels, etc. And the satellite stations are commercial-free, although for now, perhaps because the audience isn't there yet, many of NYC's second channels are also commercial-free.

HD radio stations are free, but not yet abundant. HD radio is easy to use but doesn't yet integrate with your stereo or car the way that Sirius and XM do. Check HDRadio.com to see what stations are in your neighborhood, and only buy the HD Accurian as a replacement for an old tabletop analog radio if your stations are supported.