iBiquity Digital and HD Radio are once again in the headlines. First, the company raised another $42 million from investors including CBS Radio, Clear Channel, Radio One, and Entercom Communications. Looks like the major groups think HD Radio has a chance. Then it was announced that Best Buy would be selling Insignia’s new portable HD Radio. Read about the radio here. You can also read a less than glowing Wall Street Journal review of the radio here.

Perry Michael Simon, Editor of All Access News-Talk-Sports, recently bought one of the Insignia radios and shared his HD experience :

The worst of it (that nobody cares) came from my experience playing with one of those Best Buy portable HD Radios. Yeah, yeah, I know. But it's the cheapest and easiest way to get HD in my car, and since I can't get L.A. FMs at my house, that's the only way I can hear what they're doing on those HD subchannel things. And, despite the limited appeal of an FM-only radio in an age when even your keychain can play MP3s, store photos, and cook dinner, it's not a bad little device. In fact, I kinda like it. So when the local Best Buy finally started to sell them, I fought through the mobs of excited HD Radio purchasers and....

Okay, there were no mobs. In fact, that's "Nobody Cares," Chapter 1: If you don't go searching for them, you will never find an HD Radio in the store. These were hanging on a forlorn pegboard all the way in the back of the store, next to the cassette and CD portables, which, sadly, is appropriate company. There were no signs. There were no other models. There was no attempt to educate consumers about the technology. They were just hanging there in the Ghosts of Technology Past department, without even a price sticker on the peg.

I don't think the staff even knew they were there. All that stuff from the NAB and the Grand Exalted HD Radio Alliance about major marketing to get people to adopt, embrace, LOVE HD Radio? That's happening in another universe. I think they bought ads on the sides of unicorns. The first portable is out there, in the wild, and there's no marketing for it at all. Nobody cares.

I hooked the thing up to my car radio, and I tried it out. That leads me to "Nobody Cares," Chapter 2: You can't hold an HD signal very long, and that leads to two critical problems. One, you know how the primary HD channel is supposed to cut back to analog when you lose the HD, and cut back to HD when it's available? On several stations in L.A. and San Diego, the analog and digital are not in sync. You're listening to a show and it... stutters. The switch from analog (underwater, bassy) to digital (bright, trebly) is hard enough on the ears; if the two streams are a couple of seconds off, it's impossible. You would think that the people at these stations would notice the problem, but there it was. Nobody cares.

A bigger "Nobody Cares" problem, and one especially acute for talk radio, involves those "multicast" channels. Here's what the HD Radio marketing doesn't tell you: Those channels cut out all the time. You can't listen for very long. And it happens under all conditions. Try this: Clear day, driving along the freeway with line-of-sight to the Los Angeles antenna farm. We had one of the HD-2 channels on, and it would drop out not only while driving under bridges, but every few minutes without any apparent reason. It turns out that HD-2 and HD-3 channels disappear behind any obstruction -- hills, buildings, trees, other cars, Andrew Bynum -- and become unlistenable.

They also disappear when there's no obstruction. And the next time I get a press release trumpeting how an AM station is now available on an FM HD-2 channel, I'll know the truth -- you're not adding a thing. The "multicast" channels are unlistenable. Nobody cares.

While we're at it, a couple more multicast complaints -- I heard at least one talk station on an HD3 channel with volume levels that fluctuated so widely that it was impossible to listen for very long (the very lowest, hardest to hear levels were during the actual talk programming; the commercials were louder). Nobody at the station seems to notice.

And another HD-2 music channel played the same song every time I checked in, a couple of hours apart; I was unaware of the existence of the All-Ting TIngs channel, and even a fan of "That's Not My Name" could tell you that you probably should throw in another song or two. Just sayin'. Someone should be spending some time making sure that the rotations work, but, after all, nobody's making any money on those channels, because nobody's listening, which is because nobody's being given a compelling reason to buy into the medium, which doesn't always work anyway. This could be fixed, but, well, nobody cares.

Oh, and here's another "Nobody Cares": Proponents always promote the ability of stations to show title and artist information on the receiver's screen, a selling point against satellite radio. But when there's a syndicated show on, I've seen the screen display something like "NWN_2009_07_26_SEG1" for 20 minutes. I've seen one station stuck on "NEW_LEGAL_ID_OCT2008" with the name of the voice guy. Isn't someone at the station supposed to be checking that? I guess nobody is. Nobody cares.

Perry’s experience is not unique. HD Radio’s problem is not that people are unaware of it. People have tried HD, experienced all the problems that Perry experienced, and then told their friends. Unless radio starts taking HD radio seriously, there will be no incentive for listeners to spend money on an HD Radio, even $50.

Maybe those radio groups that bought into iBiquity should have put that money towards rehiring the programming people they let go.