Why do all the LA iHeart stations sound so terrible? I'm talking about the broadcast, not the stream. There's an "in a can" sound on all of them, like a really low-quality mp3. I flipped back and forth between MY-FM, KIIS and SirusXM, and SiriusXM had a much less compressed sound and better stereo separation. Is this all about Voltair? I don't understand the technical end of why this screws up your audio, but I've heard it does. Damn, one thing live radio had going for it was decent sound (on FM anyway) and now...well, yuck. Are listeners so used to crappy sounding audio that they just don't care anymore?
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iHeart Audio is Horrible
- Thread starter BennyB
- Start date
Possibly due to aggressive Voltair settings. But...
You can still have a very good sounding radio station while using Voltair and still get plenty of watermarks out there for the PPM meters. Audio processors have the ability to make your audio shine and they also can easily make you sound really bad. It's all in the ability of the person who cranks the knobs.
Voltair honks on the section of audio Nielsen uses to encode the "watermarks" which PPM decoders, worn by panelists, uses to register which station audio the panelist is listening too. Research found that with certain audio, especially talk and certain voices, the watermark population was lower. Voltair ensures plenty of those watermarks are present all the time. Anyone who has seen the before/after knows it works.
Some stations are very aggressive with the Voltair settings and you can hear it affecting the audio. But it doesn't make the station sound more compressed and shouldn't affect separation.
I'm guessing you're hearing a new processor and they are still dialing in the sound. Or maybe a PD who subscribes to the "suck the jock through the mic" sound. Hard to tell without being able to hear it...
Yes. Compare the waveform of a CD from 30 years ago to one made today. Add lossy compression to the "brick" of a waveform and there's not much original quality left. But today's listeners are fine with that - they don't know any better.
BTW, BennyB is making a relative judgement which is monitoring-system dependent only to an extent. Artifacts are more noticeable on some systems, less noticeable on others, but destructive none the less.
His comparison is between broadcast and satellite, not two broadcast stations. He only mentioned compression, not frequency response.
Doesn't matter. It's a comparison of two audio sources on the same system. And if a broadcast station sounds worse than Sirius/XM that's really saying something!
If we take his opinion as fact. I don't know his monitoring system, and that's how he's making this judgment. In MY opinion, Sirius sounds MUCH more compressed than ANY broadcast station, and much more limited by frequency. So who's right?
Big A makes an excellent point. You notice much less artifacts on 4 inch speakers in a noisy pickup truck than you do in a $5K audio system in a quiet Lexus.
If you have setup audio processing you know how difficult it is to find the "magic" setting for ALL radios. It MUST sound good on the PD and GM's radios and then all the other millions of people who might listen on everything from table radios with 3 inch speakers to $50K audiophile systems. You can make it sound great on home stereo systems and it sounds anemic on car radios. Make it sound good on a boombox with 4 inch speakers and it sounds like crud on decent systems. If you've been there, done that, you know what I'm getting at.
You make a good point too! Many, not all, but many of the satellite channels are so code stripped they sound ridiculous! Your point about the audio kids listen to today is valid also. Listen to some (not all) college radio...they play some of the worse sounding (technically) audio imaginable. And they think it sounds fine....
You are right. If Siruis XM's highly digitally compressed audio sounds better than an FM station, the FM station owner should look in the mirror and decide whether or not to continue operating.
The compression that Sirus XM uses is blatantly obvious. It makes most HD-2 channels sound good.
OP here. I was listening on a decent sounding car audio system (Not great, but decent. It came with the car; the same way most drive-time listeners would hear radio) in various locations around L.A. County. Sorry I'm not able to describe this better, but this is definitely not my area of knowledge! That's why I was hoping somebody in the market who knows this stuff would listen and tell me if I'm losing my mind. Best way to describe what I heard would be if you put a boombox in the bottom of a big metal garbage can. Especially annoying when the jock was talking, and bad on iHeart's KFI. I just don't hear this sound on stations in other markets.
Wavo, you said that aggressive Voltair setting can be heard on-air. What would that sound like exactly?
Wavo, you said that aggressive Voltair setting can be heard on-air. What would that sound like exactly?
I have a similar listening experience, except in my case it has to do with HD vs non-HD. Non-HD sounds like normal FM, but HD sounds like it's coming from a tin can, especially when the programming source is not dense, as in someone speaking. I try to keep my HD turned off.
However, it's likely that most other Cincinnati stations also use Voltair, so it should be equal at all stations, not just iHeart.
Not so. Stations may choose what level of enhancement is used. If set at "4" it is not audible. If set at "13" you can clearly hear it affect certain voices and music. You CAN run Voltair with no degradation of the audio if run with moderate settings.
Some companies have a policy on Voltair settings. The local PD/Engineer may have no choice in the matter.
Most processors that process BOTH analog and HD sound very much the same when the radio goes HD. The only thing I notice is the brilliance of the high freqs in HD...this is because HD is not hindered by pre-emphasis like its analog host. HD frequency response also goes to 20 Khz as opposed to 15 Khz on analog.
In my opinion...HD sounds MUCH better than analog. The noise floor is 70 db better than analog and the LACK OF CLIPPING in HD processing makes a huge difference. Still...HD should sound very close to analog. The station you site may use separate processors for analog and HD and the settings may be wildly different. They are shooting themselves in the foot, if so.
Which ones?
My experience has been that certain voices sound flanged...like certain frequencies have been enhanced, others decreased. It is hard to describe but it sounds unnatural. PPM encoding works in the midrange frequencies and is generally not audible to most listeners. The Voltair "enhances" that frequency range and, when set aggressively, can create an unnatural sound.
I wish I could explain this better. Maybe one of Telos/Omnia people will chime in here and give the expert explanation.
From Wkipedia:
Flanging /ˈflændʒɪŋ/ is an audio effect produced by mixing two identical signals together, one signal delayed by a small and gradually changing period, usually smaller than 20 milliseconds. This produces a swept comb filter effect: peaks and notches are produced in the resulting frequency spectrum, related to each other in a linear harmonic series. Varying the time delay causes these to sweep up and down the frequency spectrum. A flanger is an effects unit that creates this effect.
Can't say. They exist.
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