[BC] Sangean HD component tuner and Infusion portable Internet radio

[Robert Orban]

At 10:03 PM 12/20/2006, Dana Puopolo wrote:
>Bob,
>
>
>The notion that someone should take a medium that has perhaps 80 db of dynamic
>range and compress and limit it until is runs within a couple db of the
>CRUSHED main channel is preposterous! Why bother HAVING all that range if
>you're not going to take some advantage of it?  The one GOOD thing I've heard
>from FM HD is the lack of noise. To me at least, peak limting (and clipping)
>does the most damage to audio of anything.

You missed my point. At least in mobile reception, there will be areas 
where a significant amount of crossfading occurs between the analog FM and 
HD1 digital streams. If the volume drops 10 dB each time the radio 
crossfades from analog to digital, this will be a HUGE irritant -- far 
worse than excessive compression or peak limiting. Indeed, I believe that 
this would cause 95%+ of the audience to tune out after it happened a few 
times.

If a station wants to broadcast a wide dynamic range signal, they might as 
well do it on a stream. And even if they do, they need to process for 
source-to-source consistency. Schulke's Beautiful Music formats maintained 
the relative levels between sources well enough to allow minimal processing 
while still achieving source-to-source consistency. But that was then. 
These days, who has the time or budget to carefully adjust the loudness 
level of every element (including each commercial) before it get entered 
into a playout system? In theory, this could be done automatically by 
analyzing each file's subjective loudness level and adjusting the file's 
level appropriately (which is NOT the same as peak-normalizing the file; 
peak normalization has nothing to do with subjective loudness). But in 
practice, this isn't what happens at most stations.

Bob Orban