Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Sangean HDT-1 HD Radio Component Tuner Review

Sangean HDT-1 HD Radio Component Tuner
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
I like the HDT-1, it's easy to set up and use, I like it's high tech industrial design, I love the blue display, it looks like my satellite receiver. On stations that are not using the Ibiquity format (HD Radio), it will read the RDS data employed by many broadcasters. It's conventional AM and FM reception is good compared to other AM/FM tuners in it's price range, but it's HD reception is only adequate, at this juncture, there are no other HD tuners in this price range. I tested the HDT-1 tuner in a metropolitan area and it quickly located dozens of HD stations on the FM band and a few in the AM band. Not every market has a lot of HD station, check before buying an HD tuner. If you do not live in a metropolitan area, near the HD station, reception will be spotty and will require a roof top antenna, the included AM and FM antennae are for local reception only. When the HD signal is weak, the tuner switches to regular analog demodulation, where I live, 65 miles away from most of the transmitters, I only get four stations solidly in HD, and I have a good attic antenna system.
Please don't consider HD Radio High Definition, it is NOT high definition, it is a digital format that means terrestrial radio broadcasters may employ multi-casting, more than one program stream on the same frequency, and that's very cool. HD radio may provide a cleaner signal with no hiss on moderately weak stations. The audio is not CD quality but it's quite good, it employs MPEG encoding, it sounds like an iPod, if that's all you've heard, HD Radio is fine. MPEG is also used on satellite radio, it's the reason they can cram so much in a narrow band.
The following is an addendum to my original review.
The following contains some techno gibberish, don't sweat it, it won't hurt. The HDT-1 outperforms all my previous FM tuners, it hears stations my other tuners can't. Buried in the Info menu is a Signal Strength Indicator ( helps aiming your antenna! ), a Bit Error Rate display and a Carrier to Noise display all very interesting. I have found reception varies day to day, I now receive as many as 10 HD FM signals, on bad days only 4, HD Radio propagation is a very complex issue that taxes many Engineers, NPR's engineering department has posted some interesting data on that topic.
Some folks are suggesting things they want to add, though a TOSLINK output would be nice, I believe it is an imperative that Sangean add the ability to manually toggle HD demodulation since marginal signals bounce between the HD stream and analog, very annoying sometimes. End of dweeb rant.
Bottom line, this is a fine product, the Sangean HDT-1 is a winner.

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HDT-1 HD/AM/FM Radio component Tuner adds HD Radio Technology to your Home Theater System with graphic LCD display, Program Associated Data Services, Display indicates call sign, channel frequency, data rate, radio text, audio mode, service mode, signal quality, signal strength, IR Remote Control, Line-out

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