[BC] dueling algorithms and audio quality

[Broadcast List USER]

There is nothing wrong with digital, it is just how we choose to use it.

If everything was 44.1 kHz linear 16 bit, we would be fine.  I don't
see any reason to do things any better than CD quality.

However, the entire chain from the console to the exciter should
maintain that quality.  This means no MP3 files to play on the air,
and no overly compressed STLs to make it work over the public Internet.

The absolute worst thing you can do is keep converting from one
standard to another.  The MP3 plays back through the linear console,
then is down converted to the STL, then up converted to the audio
processor.  Those little errors just pile upon one another, and it
gets nasty.

I "fixed" a station once that everyone was sure had an antenna
problem.  It really did sound like multipath even when looking at the
antenna from a few miles away.  We replaced the oldies music library
from one of the services.  Everything was on CD, and linear, no
compression.  The antenna fixed itself when the new library hit the
air.  They had been collecting music from MP3 of different rates and
quality, and the station sounded really bad.

Just keep it linear and digital is OK.

--chip

On Oct 1, 2009, at 9:00 AM, broadcast-request at radiolists.net wrote:

>Message: 3
>From: Jerry Mathis <thebeaver32 at gmail.com>
>[...]
>The sad
>(to me) state of the art today is that the over-the-air quality of
>your
>audio is not determined by how "clean" your audio chain is by analog
>standards, over which we (as Engineers) used to exercise almost total
>control, but now is determined by the algorithm in a piece of computer
>software that we have **NO** control over AT ALL, except whether or
>not to
>use it, and we often don't have a choice even in that, because that
>choice
>was made by some system designer somewhere.
>
>And I really don't think there's an option of going back (to analog).
>[...]
>Jerry Mathis