[BC] Internet STLs

[Broadcast List USER]

I replaced an antenna at a rim shot FM.  The coverage improved quite a  
bit, but the station still sounded bad.  I was told it was multipath,  
but driving around, I was pretty sure it wasn't.

I listened to program at the studio, and the "multipath" was there  
too.  In my questioning the PD/Morning guy, I discovered that the  
music was a collection of MP3s collected in many ways.  It turned out  
they were all different rates, and some were just dreadful.

I went back to the national PD and told him what I had found, and that  
the music on this oldies station had to be replaced.  He bought a  
library from a service, delivered on CDs.  I'm not sure why, as he  
could have had it on a hard drive, but who knows.  Our 20 year old IT  
girl, and genius, ripped the library to a Google Audio SS32, and  
shipped it to the station.  It was installed, and the "multipath"  
suddenly went away.

I will never understand why people choose to weaken the product by  
going cheap!  This is a choice, and they choose to do it.  MP3s for  
source, stacking codecs, and the Internet for STL are all moves away  
from goodness.

Keep the music at CD quality, not compressed in any way, and have any  
voice tracking done in at least 44.1 kbps 16 bit linear.  TRY to get  
advertisers to supply commercials the same, but I know some want to e- 
mail MP3 files, as do the networks.  Oh, well, it is THIER product.   
Then keep it clean and noise free to the audio processor.  At that  
point, even if you are in a loudness war, it will be better sounding,  
and easier to process than if you start with compromised audio.

In another thread, TSL was discussed.  If you want higher TSL, you  
really need to keep the product clean.

--chip

On Feb 9, 2010, at 9:00 AM, broadcast-request at radiolists.net wrote:

> Message: 1
> From: Goran Tomas <gtomas.lists at gmail.com>
>
> In addition to Mike's comments, I would add less than adequate sound
> quality. Barix boxes running at maximum bitrate MP3 encoding (which
> according to the manual should be around 192 kbps) don't sound nearly
> as good as you would expect at that bitrate. Artifacts should be few
> and far between, but I found them fairly obvious most of the time. I
> know this is a backup application so the quality is not much of an
> issue, but some people are using Barix as their main STL or
> audio-over-IP distribution and others keep recommending it for such
> applications.
>
> You almost always get what you pay for...
>
> Regards,
> Goran Tomas