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KUOW Adds Fourth HD Channel
KUOW-FM in Seattle grows from three to four HD Radio channels: The station has been one of the leaders in HD Radio broadcasting, adding an HD1 (simulcast) and HD2 (alternative programming) channel in the early days. HD3 runs at just 16 Kbps with BBC Radio (mostly voice). They're now adding a fourth HD channel at 22 Kbps which will carry music programming pending approval from both the FCC (regulation) and iBiquity (technology).
KUOW uses Neural Audio pre-conditioning hardware, which optimizes an audio signal for the particular kind of compression and encoding that it will be turned into. This pretuning produces much better results than sending raw audio into broadcasting or encoding hardware. Neural said they can now encode high-quality audio with just 16 Kbps for HD Radio channels.