Symphony for Local Radio

Listeners could be receiving AM and FM radio with CD-quality sound sooner than even most broadcasters had expected

Several months ago, iBiquity Digital was riding high. With no competitors, this two-year-old firm, based in Columbia, Maryland, had a novel technology for replacing traditional AM and FM radio broadcasting with more robust digital signals. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, DC, had officially endorsed iBiquity's terrestrial digital radio format, known as IBOC (in-band on-channel). Although the FCC stopped short of finalising the licensing terms until a later hearing, it agreed to let local radio operators begin broadcasting in the new IBOC format.

It seemed only a matter of time before car owners, equipped with an IBOC radio, would be free to enjoy stunning CD-quality local programming as they cruised America's highways and byways. Meanwhile, radio broadcasters across the country would offer ancillary data (such as promotions for movie and concert tickets, or personalised share-price tickers) by piggybacking the information on the IBOC signal. iBiquity had even started to persuade radio stations to spend tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade their broadcasting equipment for the new digital signals. Then along came Motorola, with a digital-radio chipset called Symphony, to spoil the fun.

Both devices turn crackly analogue broadcasting into pristine digital radio. But the similarities end there. The iBiquity scheme involves a tuner built to receive a digital bitstream from a broadcaster transmitting a signal using the IBOC format. In contrast, the Symphony chipset takes an ordinary analogue AM or FM signal and pumps it through its powerful digital processor to enhance the sound and boost reception significantly. Symphony costs the broadcaster nothing, and consumers next to nothing—and the average listener can barely hear the difference between the two digital forms of AM or FM radio reception.

Symphony has some big advantages. To create CD-quality music, it uses not only hardware (its 24-bit signal processor is similar to those found in home-theatre equipment with fancy surround-sound features) but also a software engine. The built-in software, which lets users upgrade or customise the radio with third-party applications, can generate noise-cancelling signals to eliminate engine hum and other stray sounds. It can also pick up neighbouring stations more accurately than conventional tuners and thus avoid interference. The “spectrum buffer” required by the FCC to stop adjacent stations interfering with each other could be cut in half, says John Hansen of Motorola. That could double the number of possible stations in the AM/FM bands.

Motorola is selling samples of its Symphony chipset to developers for about $30 apiece. Once in volume production, the chipset is expected to cost only a few dollars. The company hopes that products based on Symphony will be on the market by Christmas 2003. Ryan Jones of the Yankee Group, a technology consultancy in Boston, expects Motorola to entice consumers who do not want to wait for iBiquity's digital broadcasting system, or are unwilling to pay monthly subscription fees for digital satellite radio. “But over the longer term,” says Mr Jones, “a pure digital solution offers a number of different advantages—such as higher sound-quality, longer range, and ancillary data features.”

Eventually, digital radio could evolve into an industry which, in shape if not size, resembles the television industry—where broadcast, cable and satellite compete at the margins but otherwise share a lucrative market. Analysts at Allied Business Intelligence of Oyster Bay, New York, believe that sales of digital radios will jump nearly 50-fold to 33m by 2007. Meanwhile, Cahner's In-Stat, a technology forecasting firm with offices in Newton, Massachusetts, expects to see one in every two radios sold in America equipped with a digital decoder within four years. Whatever happens to iBiquity, the days of the squeaky AM/FM tuner are clearly numbered.