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New HD Receivers!There was a trade show held recently, by coincidence, right here in Denver called the CEDIA Expo. While the show was primarily for custom installations of home audio and theater systems, I was surprised and pleased to see that five manufacturers used the Expo to announcenew HD receivers. New Cambridge SoundWorks tabletop HD Radio To me personally, the most interesting was Cambridge SoundWorks, which announced two new HD radio products. One is actually a stereo tabletop radio called the Radio 820HD. It will retail for $299.99 and will be available for purchase in November. The radio has a telescoping antenna to support the FM band, and a large internal ferrite antenna to support the AM band. As a result, the Radio 820HD will deliver FM channels with near CD-quality sound, and AM with FM-quality sound, HD2 side channels and text information, such as artist and song titles, traffic alerts and sports scores. Cambridge SoundWorks also introduced a new component HD radio tuner that will retail for $299.99 and will be available for purchase in November. The tuner comes configured for rack mounting and features three signal outputs: two digital and one analog. New high-end HD receiversIn addition to these two new receivers from SoundWorks, Audio Design Associates(ADA), Denon Niles, Onkyo and Rotel also discussed HD Receivers. However, ADA's HDM-1 HD Radio Tuner Module for use in its family of tuners and multiroom receivers is the only one already shipping. It is available as a single-module black-box chassis (TSS-1) at an MSRP of $999 or sold separately as a module for an MSRP of $600. High cost mystery solved According to Bernie Sapienza, vice president ofretail business development for iBiquity,the developer of HDRadio, "The biggest impediment [to having more HD Radio compatible products developed] has been that the chipset had been pretty expensive. The chipset had a cost of greater than $125 in the beginning of '04. The pricing has changed significantly since then and that is causing numerous manufacturers to see the value now." The price drop is leading many manufacturers to incorporate HD Radio into their products, he says. "The chipset now finds itself at much more reasonable pricing which, depending on the number of markups, can make the finished product anywhere from $100 to $200. That's much more reasonably in the game as far as the average consumer is concerned."
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