I have a Best Buy insignia brand home stereo that has an HD tuner built-in. You can tell a difference in the sound quality between FM and HD channels. The HD station is CD quality and offers clearer music. The big downside to HD Radio is that there aren’t as many stations in my area.

Best Buy has announced the first portable HD Radio player called the Insignia HD Radio Portable Player. The device is powered by an internal rechargeable lithium ion battery and has ten presets to store your favorite stations. The device also sports a 1.5-inch LCD screen for viewing channel information.

Last weekend Best Buy made a quiet release of their latest line of the budget-minded Insignia media players, one of which being the 4GB Insignia Pilot. The Insignia players have always been somewhat in the background, offering decent “Best-Buy brand” players at affordable prices, but this latest release has some competitive features at a very competitive price which should give a lot of more popular brands a run for their money.

The player supports playback of MP3, WMA, WMA Lossless, WMA DRM, WMA Pro, OGG, WAV and Audible audio files along with MPEG4 (30 fps) and WMV (30 fps) for video. It will also support viewing JPEG still images. Users can watch video and view images on a nice-sized 2.4″ widescreen LCD and it offers up to 25 hours of audio playback on a single charge.