HD Radio, still waiting for the world to notice

David Pogue of the New York Times has some fun at the expense of HD Radio.

My wife really wanted to listen to KRCC's HD Radio substations, so for her birthday I got (and with a great deal of trouble, installed), a Dual HD radio in her car.

So far, the major benefit of the radio is that I can listen to whatever is on KRCC - HD2 when the main channel is busy with the pledge drive. When you're listening to the main channel, however, the HD Radio does have the highly annoying habit of switching between the analog and the digital signal, which are slightly off synchronization. So it sounds like the radio is stuttering. And there's no way to simply turn the HD off, that I'm aware of.

Anyhoo, I'm not a huge fan of the technology, and I fully agree with Pogue that the way the radio industry rolled it out was pretty poor (and, as it turns out, a panicked response to a threat from satellite radio that proved to be largely imaginary).