[BC] Could our concept of audio be all wrong?

[Robert Orban]

At 09:10 AM 3/13/2009, Goran Tomas wrote:
>Maybe, if someone designed a better and more reasonable standard (and who
>better than yourself?) and proposed it to the regulating bodies, we could
>bring quality back into FM radio...

The last serious attempt to do this was Dolby FM in the late 1970s. 
It failed because highly processed audio (by the standards of the 
late 1970s) caused by the Dolby B encoder to be in full compression 
almost all of the time and made the sound of non-Dolby receivers seem dull.

FMX was a clever idea that was proposed later, but was a noise 
reduction system that did not require backing off processing. It 
failed because of multipath sensitivity and inadequate compatibility 
with badly aligned radios, which allowed the compressed quadrature 
channel to leak through into the audio.

I've been preaching the quality sermon since the 8000 was introduced, 
and the congregation just goes out to sin again :-) In the U.S., I 
think that it is unlikely that FM audio quality will be regulated in 
the future, as FCC has progressively loosened such rules over the 
years and shows absolutely no sign of wanting to re-regulate that 
part of broadcasting.

I'm sure that ITU412 was created with good intentions. However, IMO 
ITU412 was ill-conceived because the MPX power control occurs after 
pre-emphasis and has no psychoacoustic weighting whatsoever. 
Therefore, if one transmits audio exactly at the power limit, 
loudness becomes inconsistent, being dependent on the spectral and 
spatial content of the program material. This is certainly an 
unintended consequence that no one who originally worked on the 
standard had anticipated.

Bob Orban