Tuning in with the Recepter

Mar 1, 2006 12:00 AM

In the March 2006 Reader Feedback, David Saviet shared his experience with the Boston Acoustics Recepter HD receiver. He has recorded some audio samples of various stations he has received to show the audio performance of this radio.

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I have been listening to stations with the Boston Acoustics Recepter HD receiver, and I have to tell you that I am impressed with this receiver's selectivity. I use rabbit ears for FM reception and receive every New York-area HD Radio station. What I have noticed with the BA's HD Radio reception is that stereo separation in digital is much more pronounced, and the HD 2 channels run what appears to be about 80 percent as loud as the HD 1 channel.

As with any new technology, there is a learning curve, although with this radio there's more learning what the radio is capable of as opposed to how to use it.

The weakness is in the antenna provided with the radio. Is it a lack of sensitivity or the fact that an external antenna is needed to make the radio shine? Again, who purchases a component-quality receiver and doesn't connect an external antenna to it? I have never operated a receiver with such spectacular skirt selectivity characteristics. The absolutely clean second-adjacent audio demos I've provided speak volumes to that selectivity and I am in a region served by many city-grade signals on both bands.

Still, HD Radio is a major improvement in how we receiver our broadcast signals and for a first generation receiver the Boston Acoustics Recepter HD is quite impressive and takes advantage of everything HD Radio has to offer.

I made an audio demo of some of the signals that I have received with the radio. The demo contains stations I received on different frequencies on a single afternoon. For this demo I used a passive indoor loop. I was able to receive several different adjacent-channel stations running IBOC.

The first station on the demo (WOR, New York) demonstrates the kind of signal I received. It acts as the control in this experiment. The next signal on the demo was recorded during the start of afternoon critical hours. The station is WLW, Cincinnati on 700kHz. WOR was still running its IBOC encoder on 710kHz.

Likewise, the recordings of WPIT (730kHz 5kW, non-D) were made while WOR was running IBOC. The lack of any digital QRM is immediately noticeable.

So much for the complaints of IBOC causing interference to second- and third-adjacent stations.

Dave Saviet
New York City

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