[BC] Re: Who's on the throne of Radio?

[Goran Tomas]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 5:17 PM,  <RichardBJohnson at comcast.net> wrote:
> What is to replace the high fidelity radio station? Certainly
> there is a market. It hasn't been replaced by iPods or IBUZ
> stations. Certainly there are people, even young people whose
> ears have not yet been clipped and limited to a one decibel
> dynamic range, who would understand and appreciate that most
> of the emotion in music is carried in the quietness between
> the notes.

It may look like most of younger people have been deafened by their
iPods and other music players. There's a guy at work in his early
twenties, whose doctor diagnosed him a permanent hearing loss. He
liked to listen to club music loudly on his iPod, he says... Looking
at the vast majority of young (and middle aged) people who have their
ear buds on while traveling, one has to wonder about the state of
hearing of general population. Let's hope those SPLs are reasonable.

It may also look like the younger people are used to low quality audio
these days, and that they don't perceive obvious perceptual coding
artifacts as objectionable. But somehow I'm not buying that... The
fact is a young, healthy individual will have a much better hearing
than most of the people. Fact of life is that they simply hear more
high-end. However biased they may be, provided they are given a
quality comparison, I believe most will be able to pick a cleaner,
higher fidelity source.

On AES conference in San Francisco this September, there was
broadcasting session titled "Listener fatigue and longevity". In
particular one of the speakers, Ted Ruscitti, had a very, very
interesting presentation. He was doing a research on behalf of his
client, who wanted to see whether his company should or should not
invest in IBOC. Unfortunately, I could not get Mr. Ruscitti to publish
the results of this research or give any more information, so you'll
have to trust me on this. The part of the research that he was
reporting had to do with sound quality - what did people perceive as
bad and what not so bad. There was a 10 point list of things that
included mono compatibility, excessive stereo width, multiband
dynamics compression (this was way down on the list, IOW people didn't
find multiband dynamics compression (without clipping) objectionable),
clipped audio (was much higher on the list), etc. On the top of the
list, the things that people found most objectionable were - stacked
(cascaded) codecs and low bitrate final transmission coding. What the
presenter especially pointed out, was the sensitivity of the younger
people that were interviewed on the audio quality - they choose linear
over coded formats every time. There was actually a video recording of
the responses of some of them and while they couldn't say what was
wrong, they said things like "something is wrong with that one", "it
sounds plain, while the other one sounds alive", etc.

I guess what I'm trying to say is don't loose faith in young people. A
lot of them can tell bad audio from good quality audio.

Regards,
Goran Tomas