Ah, the Sound, but Oh, the Bumps on the Road to Digital Radio

Digital radio broadcasts, after years of dreaming and development, are finally arriving on the air. And at first, this technology might not seem terribly enticing: The hardware needed to tune in these new signals is laughably expensive and few stations transmit in digital anyway. ¶ But its sharper, clearer sound is an improvement for what it leaves out: Digital FM eliminates analog FM's scratches and pops and much of its background hiss. The results are not quite CD quality -- the way a song is compressed for broadcast makes digital FM's sonic fidelity closer to that of an MP3 file. With jazz or classical, the greater clarity is easy to notice; voices and heavily produced pop music can sound almost the same in digital and analog. ¶ On AM, there's no mistaking digital for analog. The routine buzzing static is gone, replaced by a clear, crisp, if sometimes brassy sound that sounds not too different from high-quality Web radio. It makes these frequencies good for something besides traffic reports and baseball games -- you can actually enjoying listen to music on AM. ... Washington Post TechNews.com link