That's exactly what the IHeart station's are doing, setting the Voltair at the max making it audible. I don't notice it on the Cumulus or Hubbard cluster station's. Radio One has the same audible hollow effect on their 3 signals.
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iHeart Audio is Horrible
- Thread starter BennyB
- Start date
That's exactly what the IHeart station's are doing, setting the Voltair at the max making it audible. I don't notice it on the Cumulus or Hubbard cluster station's. Radio One has the same audible hollow effect on their 3 signals.
There is evidence that PPM enhancement helps. After the Voltair came out Nielsen modified their PPM generators firmware to populate the watermarks better. Many stations still run the Voltair and you can still see where the watermark population is better post Voltair.
Nielsen claims you don't need Voltair...especially after their modifications. i forget the specific number of watermarks received to get quarter hour credit but it's low. Maybe David Eduardo/Big A will chime in here with the number. At any rate, it's not many. The Voltair folks argue their enhancement still helps in difficult listening environments i.e. in noisy places like airports, malls, ballparks, etc.
You can make the argument that degrading the audio will affect TSL. These days it seems low bit rate MP3 audio is acceptable to most people so WTF...
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I agree and disagree. Something that sounds good on an expensive system/speakers or high quality headphones, will sound equally good on a table radio with 4" speakers. Good is good. Now that said, can audio processing make a table radio with 4" speakers sound better than it would normally sound? No, but you will still have the best quality sound for whatever listening device. When it comes to setting up processing, you need to start with the best reference reception device possible, and adjust for that.
Back in the late 60's and 70's AM stations used to try and equalize the station for what they thought people were listening on. 4" speakers and being the loudest were usually the goal. That's why stations ran 50db of compression and 60db of clipping and ultra fast attack and release times, with anything below 100HZ and above 5KHZ rolled off. Fast forward to the 21st Century.. Now we compete with portable music players and headphones designed for enhanced bass and high frequency performance. Over-processing to make music that radio listeners probably hear in their un-processed form makes radio inferior sounding. Old-school thinking PD's and Engineers that think listeners believe that distorting or over-equalizing the station sounds good or plays better on certain radios, do so at their own peril.
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I respectfully disagree.
You can setup audio processing to make a table radio/boombox sound "terrific" and those same settings will sound awful on a decent system with cabinet speakers. You must use the processing to compensate for what is lacking with a small speaker enclosed in plastic. And the description "terrific" is relative/subjective...
I agree that "good" sounds "good" on any radio...I understand your point. But in an imperfect listening environment audio processing can make "good" sound "better." As you well know, there are trade offs to be made because environments differ greatly. Example - In a noisy pickup truck dynamic range should be restricted so the quiet parts don't get masked by road noise. Sports compression increase crowd noise and add excitement to the broadcast and make it easier to hear if listening at the game. Restriction of dynamic range does NOT sound good on a good audio system...
I hear what you're saying...especially on HD channels. Aim for high quality and forget the "proud it's loud" mentality. That may have made sense in the days of manual tuning but not today. I agree that compromising you audio quality will affect TSL - especially with women. We do, however, live in aa world with low quality MP3 audio considered "OK" by most kids...
AM is a different conversation - loud is always good on AM unless you crossover into distortion by going past 95% negative modulation...most detectors don't like that.
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I am wondering too why American radio-station's sounds so bad at streaming? Do American listners have lower standards when it comes to audio quality?
I think it is not really a problem to use an audio stream (aac) with up to 256 kbits, stereo at 48khz. As many radio-station's around the world are using higher streaming, the radio streams from the U.S. sounds really poor. Why is that?
It's not about iheart radio-station's alone, most of the streams of Radio.com sounds so bad as well, but some of them sounds ok. Radio-Station's from Europe are using most of it mp3 streaming 128 kbits at 48 khz and I feel it sounds a lot better.
I think it is not really a problem to use an audio stream (aac) with up to 256 kbits, stereo at 48khz. As many radio-station's around the world are using higher streaming, the radio streams from the U.S. sounds really poor. Why is that?
It's not about iheart radio-station's alone, most of the streams of Radio.com sounds so bad as well, but some of them sounds ok. Radio-Station's from Europe are using most of it mp3 streaming 128 kbits at 48 khz and I feel it sounds a lot better.
It eats up a lot of bandwidth, and not everyone can handle it.
Why not giving then a second audio stream to choose like European radio-station do so?
france rtl
http://fluxradios.blogspot.com/2014/07/flux-url-rtl.html
germany dlf
https://www.deutschlandradio.de/streamingdienste.219.de.html
france rtl
http://fluxradios.blogspot.com/2014/07/flux-url-rtl.html
germany dlf
https://www.deutschlandradio.de/streamingdienste.219.de.html
Bandwidth costs money. Stations do not make significant money from their streams.
It depends. iHeart is free, so it doesn't. Some pay services offer an option.
Some do, but not the major aggregators
Compared to the U.S. almost all, but maybe the makers are thinking, cheap programms does not deserve a good stream. But I don't think so. I noticed in Europe they better like to listen to music on the radio with world news on top of the hour and in American people love to listen to talk. Music is playing anyway on Spotify.
Where do you get this idea?
Subscribers pay extra for better audio on Spotify.
Music laws are very different in Europe.
Talk radio, even in the most information-oriented markets, only gets around 15% of the listening. So that statement is just wrong.
In the very large United States, "foreign" news is only broadcast if it has some effect on the United States. Local and national news predominates. And most news consumption is in the morning hours, so music stations don't generally have newscasts beyond the 9 AM hour.
Further, as long ago as the 60's stations discovered that the "top of the hour" was not necessarily the place for news in many formats. In fact, many of us believe that the "top of the hour" is the worst place for news as that is the transitional point for many human activities, such as getting to work, school or an appointment. That's why things like "twenty-twenty news" and other variants have worked well in the past on music stations.
Beyond that, I really do not get what your point is; every nation and every part of the world has different interests and cultures so comparing French or German radio (most of which is national, not local) is irrelevant and inappropriate.
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