[BC] Re: It's Eureka over IBOC down under

[Robert Orban]

At 04:45 AM 10/21/2005, you wrote:
>From: RRSounds at aol.com
>Subject: [BC] Re: It's Eureka over IBOC down under
>To: broadcast at radiolists.net
>Cc: David at translantech.com
>Message-ID: <1f9.14df1759.308a35c6 at aol.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
>
>
>It makes me feel so old to say this, BUT...
>
>When I was young, Broadcast FM radio was the cleanest, most dynamic and
>spectrally broad, lowest distortion audio source most people had access too.
>
>Of course the engineering staff at any particular station had quite a bit of
>control over how seriously they took that capability, but nonetheless,
>technically FM could equal or beat any other consumer audio source!
>
>And while one could listen to FM on inferior equipment and have an inferior
>but adequate listening experience, one could also spend more and ultimately
>have a more hi-fi experience. The 'adequate' experience was merely one 
>subset of
>the bigger universe of radio listening.
>
>The present paradigm doesn't allow for that. The better the receiving
>equipment you buy, the worse broadcast radio sounds, because all kinds of 
>artifacts
>are revealed. And it's not just FM, which still CAN sound very very good. 
>IBOC
>or any grossly data-reduced system plays to a rather low common denominator,
>welding into place a level of quality that no receiver, no matter how
>expensive, can improve upon because it is never transmitted in the first 
>place.
>
>I'm not talking about content, or what the other content providers are doing.
>That's a whole different discussion. I'm talking about the relative technical
>status of OUR delivery system. We have long ago let slip any hold on the
>title "state of the art." How it happened, and who to blame is yet another
>discussion. I'll let someone else point the fingers.
>
>Maybe, "adequate" or "entertainment-quality" audio is what we're destined to
>provide for the future. So be it. I have no illusions. I'll do the best I can
>within those confines, working to offer the best listening experience I 
>can. I
>think most of us want to.
>
>But I sure wish there was a way to work toward bringing at least some of the
>OLD paradigm to the listening experience, where, if you wanted to and could
>afford it, you could turn on a RADIO to hear the reference, the best quality
>audio available to the consumer.

I think that older guys like us tend to look at the past through 
rose-colored glasses. FM mono could be reference-quality with the music of 
the 1940s through 1960 before the advent of FM stereo. However, stereo 
introduced serious problems by adding 23 dB to the noise floor and also 
vastly increasing the system's sensitivity to multipath. Having 
reference-quality FM stereo reception usually required an outdoor antenna 
with a rotator, carefully aligned to minimize multipath. (My old Marantz 
10B tuner  has a built-in oscilloscope to help align the antenna for 
minimum multipath.)

The FM pre-emphasis curve was more-or-less complementary to the HF power 
handling of vinyl records using RIAA equalization. So everything was pretty 
good back in the days of vinyl. However, the availability of CD (which has 
flat power-handling vs frequency) eventually moved the record industry to 
brighter mixes that pre-emphasized FM could not accommodate without either 
reducing average modulation dramatically or applying very audible HF 
limiting. Some would argue that today's CD are mastered way too bright, but 
the fact remains that pre-emphasized FM analog is incapable of handling 
this material in an audibly transparent way without reducing average 
modulation by something in the order of 10 dB compared to today's standard 
practices.

Bob Orban