HD Radio option?

You know, it would be a nice bonus to include HD Radio compatible AM/FM jacks on future Outlaw pre/pros and receivers.

I'm not ready to actually pay for radio, but I have about 20 HD stations in my area I'd love to hear.

I just wanted to bring this up since I see the newest Integra/Onkyo processors have this feature.

You mean an HD radio tuner, right?

I would also like to see an HD radio tuner in Outlaw products.

Just to be correct here you guys do know that the HD in HD-radio does NOT stand for High-Def? It actually stands for "Hybrid Digital" which describes the modulation scheme. HD-Radio can sound better than standard FM because it will eliminate the distortion effects of multi-path. However HD-radio does NOT offer extended bandwidth over conventional FM. It DOES offer the ability of a single station to carry multiple programs of signal. The problem is that with more than two channels the quality available for any channel will degrade (much like what happens on cable TV when they try to stuff too many HD signals onto the cable and over compress them).

Is HD radio subject to the same foibles as digital over the air tv, for example, being messed up if you have a lot of trees or a major airport between you and the transmitter?

I don't (yet) have access to an HD tuner so I can't comment on how well it works. HD does have it's problems though. An HD station located on an adjacent channel to an analog station can have sideband crud spill over and interfere with the analog station. The FCC is to blame for this as they approved of the allowed level of spurious sideband emissions for HD radio.

I didn't know about the sideband interference issue. Go FCC! Mostly I enjoy my local radio programming and like the idea of expanded free programming. Seems like just the sort of thing to increase diversity in the airwaves. Of course if the implementation is faulty then we might have to wait a while yet..