[BC] HD Radio multicasting bandwidth

[Bernie Courtney]

XM is touted as having "hundred of channels of CD quality music" yet to me
it seems more like hundreds of channels of mp3 quality, but yet their
subscription base still continues to climb, and even I myself have had my
subscription ever since about a year after they went live. I knew this going
in though, I expected digital compression for the trade off of having 3
channels of a format that doesn't really exist in my market. Had I gone out
and dropped a wad of cash expecting to get better audio quality I would have
been pretty angry, but then again I know countless people who swear XM
sounds great.

I think this new young generation a few people area speaking of, those who
grew up with Napster and digital music players have just lowered their
standards for what is acceptable audio quality. Most MP3's that people
outside the professional or DJ arena trade are still encoded at 128K which
still is a far cry from CD quality, yet thousands, maybe tens of thousands
listen to these files daily on their ipods or other playback devices. Many
have just accepted this tradeoff of quality for the time and cost savings of
(illegal) downloading.

This may change some once legitimate music purchases from iTunes (which
encodes their files AAC at either 128 or 192 i believe) increases and people
begin to hear the difference on a regular basis going between file in their
playlists. But overall I know very few people my own age that give a dam
about the quality of the audio they have, just the fact that they HAVE the
song they want to hear, even if it sounds like it was recorded through a tin
can and length of string.

Bern
On 10/18/05, WLOYPROD WLOYPROD <WLOYPROD at loyola.edu> wrote:
>
> my question would be Who is running these tests, what are their criteria
> for selection of listeners and what are the tracks being used for
> comparison AND what do they stand to gain from the 'right' conclusions?
> my 'real world' students often point out the differences in sampling
> rates on MP3 files, wave files and CDs, and in their own collections
> none of them uses less than 128kbps saying "the lower ones sound bad"...
> since these kids are the ones you want to get into HD Radio
> (upper/middle class, educated, overloaded with disposable income), folks
> better think LONG and hard about this steady destruction of audio
> quality. Bad enough you want 5kHz on AM, but now 48kbps for an on-air
> signal?! Might as well shut off the tower lights and go home.
>
> While I realize no one ever got rich overstimating the public... this
> one is a dangerous underestimation of what people will tolerate.
>
> It's kind of like the idea of continuing to refer to iBiquity as "CD
> Quality" - one bad idea too many...
>
> John
>
> >>> barry at oldradio.com 10/18/05 10:15 AM >>>
> At 05:37 AM 10/18/2005, Neil Glassman wrote
> > >From the synopsis of one study, "testing indicates that 48 kbps is
> perceived
> >by most listeners as providing equal sound quality to the maximum rate
> of 96
> >kbps. Just as importantly, the testing demonstrates that the optimal
> bit
> >rate allocation varies according to specific categories of
> programming,
> >including voice and different genres of music."
>
> So ... all the discussions and hand wringing
> over those who can hear the artifacts are
> really moot, aren't they?
>
> 192, 128, 96, .... the listeners don't mind 48,
> for the most part.
>
> Are there any studies that contradict this?
>
>
>
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