I just installed the brand new JVC KD-HDR1 car radio with HD Radio. This is by far the lowest cost HD radio on the market. ($279 after rebate from Crutchfield) It has a lot of features, including multichannel capability, and auxiliary inputs (with adapters) for CD changers, Ipods, XM and Delphi radio.
I give it a 7 out of 10, unfortunately it is the AM section that lowers the rating.
It has a builtin CD/CDR/MP3/WMA player with title text readout too.
Generally it plays pretty well, except the AM band section has a few bugs:
1) It will not scan stations above 1610 kHz! You can step to them and put them in the memories, but you cannot scan to them and have the radio find them.
2) The AM HD radio sensitivity is not so great. I don’t have a good point of reference for the other receivers available, but from my location in Cherry Hill area, WIP and WPEN played fairly well in HD (although both of these stations have serious HD EQ/processing problems), WDAS sounded great, but kept cutting in and out of HD because the signal was not strong enough (1.2 mV/m) to hold the HD in lock. WOR just barely locked up at 0.6 mV/m. The text came in well enough, but the radio rarely went to HD audio andthen only for a few seconds.
3) The AM HD switching is JARRING. When listening to WPEN in analog and then have the digital switch in, it was most annoying. It almost sounded like the station was changed, even though the program was the same. As I mentioned before, the EQ and processing is so different betweeen the HD feed and the analog that it was nasty. There should be a fade in delay of 1 sec or so, not a hard switch. I know that when the signal unlocks there needs to be a hard switch.
4) If you select an HD-2 channel on FM and turn the car off, the radio comes back with the HD-1 channel. Similarly if you set a button for an HD-2 station, it actually gets set for the HD-1 channel.
The FM section played nicely with clean HD signals, and it was fun to sample the HD2 channels.
Audio quality was fine, as far as I could tell on my Jeep stock speakers, unless there is an equalization mismatch between the AM analog and digital signal paths.
Ted Schober