Internet Radio

J

Jordan Lahr

Junior
Aug 10, 2011
310
0
0
Sioux falls, SD
Yeah I know its weird but still considered part of audio right? My question (after listening to a lot of local radio stations online stations) is why the hell do they compress the S#!7 out of the music when streaming. Its not like they are worried about bandwidth (compression in this sense wont help you there) they are streaming at 128kb/s. It sounds like someone took a radio out of the closet from 1980's (you know the kind that got rid of the tubes but wasn't quite there with the tuner) and put an iPhone speaker on it. I'm listening through some decent headphones Shure SE215's and a decent sound card so its not the digital to analog transfer (CD's sound great). So what the fck?

Did some monkey set it up or what? I also tend to believe its not a money issue as well because the quallity is roughly the same from the huge country stations to the smaller indy station in town.
 
Re: Internet Radio

A lot of places cheap out and grab their air processed feed for the streaming encoder. Good streaming encoding is expensive.

At the college station I work with, we are running separate processing on the streams. But we're still going for some processing. Some songs are fun to compare Air to stream because we're running a newer processing product on the stream that isn't so destructive.
 
Re: Internet Radio

Eric Simna said:
A lot of places cheap out and grab their air processed feed for the streaming encoder. Good streaming encoding is expensive.

At the college station I work with, we are running separate processing on the streams. But we're still going for some processing. Some songs are fun to compare Air to stream because we're running a newer processing product on the stream that isn't so destructive.
Click to expand...

I think this is likely. I stream live audio to our local community station using Shoucast/Nicecast and 128 is fine. What happens to it after the board at the station (OptiSquash) is not my fault. The digital streaming compression @ 128bps is amazingly good. I suspect that any excessive audio compression is the more likely culprit, whether applied between studio and transmitter or in the recording and mastering of the original material.
 
Re: Internet Radio

Telos/Omnia have a processing product now that offers an "anti-loudness" algorithm. Basically, through various compression schemes, it will undo some of the overmastering of original material. It also functions as a nice jock watcher, in case the DJ runs the channel into clip. It's the Omnia 9 processor.

Our main web stream is running the 9/xe streaming version. You can listen in at http://www.wjcu.org/listen. We stream AAC and MP3 in both high and low versions. The station has a wide variety of formats being a college station. We only run a single processing preset for everything. It seems to work out fairly well. (sorry, that was mildly off topic)
 
Top Bottom