What kind of terrible watermarking is this (KFI and others)?

[mets18]

When the Mets were on WOR here it was unlistenable. Sports broadcasts really suffer because of the periods of inactivity. I hear it on WEPN and WFAN as well with the Rangers and Yankees.

 

[yeoldeschool]

When the Mets were on WOR here it was unlistenable. Sports broadcasts really suffer because of the periods of inactivity. I hear it on WEPN and WFAN as well with the Rangers and Yankees.

then every station that has it must have it set in correctly.. i heard it on WMJI 105.7 cleveland when i lived in NW PA and it was AWFUL... downright disgusting and obvious to even the average listener

I'm happy to see that the other adjectives I was tempted to use in my original post, but didn't out of fear of overdoing things, have been covered by you two.

https://www.indexcom.com/tech/ppm/

[...]
This is a dangerous and slippery slope. Put simply, these devices make your radio station sound worse, trashing broadcast audio, driving more listeners away from traditional broadcast in favor of new media and streaming that isn’t using such devices. With this philosophy, you must hope to gain more audience than you will lose. Because new media and streaming does not suffer from pre-emphasis-induced high frequency headroom limitations and is impervious to noise and multipath distortion, new media and streaming already has a sonic advantage over FM radio. Why handicap FM further? Proceed with extreme caution here!"

I could not agree more. This is exactly my thinking, and in fact, I am shocked that any device whose artifacts are capable of being cranked up this loudly could even come from a company operated by one of the two big O processor inventors. They made their names in the business specifically on eliminating even the most subtle of unwanted distortions (by average listener standards). So how is this possible? Is it that the Voltair was designed to allow a maximum amplification setting that's transparent when used, for example, only on heavy metal, meaning misapplication of such settings to other formats is always the station's fault? Or did the designers simply feel that its maximum amplification level would be audibly transparent to all but pony-tailed, golden-eared audiophiles no matter the format? I can barely even accept the first possibility, because even when running a format that might mask the heaviest setting, you still have sections of songs whose spectral density isn't like white noise. Metal songs, believe it or not, often has acoustic passages. And then of course there are all of the station's music beds, promos, and last but not least, the commercials. Wouldn't the all mighty dollar dictate that driving people away from the advertising with a constant "zangy, dampered reverberation" effect is bad for business?

This box really needs to be re-designed. It needs to have the same kind of algorithms used to determine whether clipper distortion is masked or not applied for detecting whether the amplification of the PPM data bandlets is masked or not, so the amplification amount can be decided fully automatically, being kept at "the inaudible maximum" at all times. Maybe this is something Bob Orban can come to the rescue on once again. He could call his version of the box the "Optimark."

Not every station in PPM markets uses a Voltair. Some use the Nielsen device that won't allow extreme artifact creation, and some don't use any enhancement. Among competitive stations, there is the fear that if you don't "turn it up to 11" your competitor has an advantage. On the other hand, stations wonder why TSL is lower than ever and I personally think that the Voltair is the reason.

Speaking for myself, I cannot listen to the music stations in Los Angeles that use this thing audibly (and there are some that sound very close to KFI). With speech, I can tolerate it, but it is a constant irritant -- enough of one that, as said, upon first hearing the effect, I actually believed my tuner was dying.

Shouldn't every listener count? Isn't that important too? You might have the best programming in town, but if Nielsen isn't counting your listeners properly, that will mean less money for programming.

Listeners weren't properly counting themselves under the diary system, either. To say otherwise would be to claim PPM was invented to replace something better with something worse. Further, imagine all the ways listeners can still screw up PPM. How often do people thoughtlessly switch to earbuds while wearing their meters, perhaps because the gardener shows up or some other source of background noise becomes intrusive for several hours? How many people simply forget to take them with them all the time? How much overt fraud is there (fanboys trying to promote their favorite stations, or people trying to promote their favorite political views, by strapping the meters to their dogs' collars and leaving their stereos on all day while at work)? Even gyro sensors intended to detect meters that have been left behind won't know it's really Rover who can't get enough of [insert station here]. So bottom line, no, every listener doesn't count. There's always a margin of error. I see no reason why PPM detection failures can't be a part of that. Eliminating them within reason is fine, and I'm sure you can gain listeners when using something like Voltair inaudibly. But I can only believe that once such devices are driven hard enough to be audible, any gains you see will be canceled out by losses not only in the form of people who physically abandon you entirely, but in the form of people who stay but with appreciably to vastly shorter TSLs. Especially imagine how much aggregate listening the latter would amount to, multiplied by the number of people who continue to listen. That's a lot of loss.

 

[yeoldeschool]

Can one actually hear the so-called "watermarking"? This conversation thread has me really intrigued.
What does it sound like?

[...] The only way to hear a watermarker would be to invert and cancel the pre-marked audio against the watermarker's output. That can't be done without a willing engineer at a station with a PPM encoder who could capture bit accurate digital audio from the "before" and "after" points surrounding the watermarking box. (I'd be curious to hear what it sounds like too, if any such engineer is out there reading.)

Okay, I appear to have found someone who did just that. Check the MP3 link at the bottom of this article for audio of isolated PPM tones. My, what a hell's chorus.

Is Nielsen's PPM Making Radio Unlistenable?

Is Nielsen's PPM Making Radio Unlistenable? Recently Nielsen touted ratings growth coinciding with the roll-out of enhanced PPM encoding (eCBET). According to Nielsen, the enhanced encoding, "Makes the PPM codes stronger and more robust, which improves code detection in challenging...

www.radioinsights.com

Also attaching my spectralgram of that MP3.

 

[Brian Bowers]

Back a number of years ago I did a simple A-B test with just the PPM encoder in the audio chain (the Voltair was in Bypass). This was done on both a CHR and an Active Rock music station. The A-B test was conducted with the PPM encoder active, and then in Bypass mode. Within seconds I could tell that the non-encoded air signal sounded so much cleaner without the PPM encoder encoding. I always hated the way music sounded on our PPM encoded stations. Then along came Voltair, which corporate distributed to all of the stations it owned, and made us turn it up all the way. Barf! And owners and programmers wonder why PUR numbers dwindle every minute. I'm very thankful almost all PPM encoded radio stations won't spend the money to insert a Voltair into their webstream audio chain.

 

[Yabadabado1]

Good grief! I would have snapped off my ON/OFF knob on my radio in 1/10th of a second if I heard that noise coming out of my speakers.

 

[sdwulfdawg]

Okay, I appear to have found someone who did just that. Check the MP3 link at the bottom of this article for audio of isolated PPM tones. My, what a hell's chorus.

Is Nielsen's PPM Making Radio Unlistenable?

Is Nielsen's PPM Making Radio Unlistenable? Recently Nielsen touted ratings growth coinciding with the roll-out of enhanced PPM encoding (eCBET). According to Nielsen, the enhanced encoding, "Makes the PPM codes stronger and more robust, which improves code detection in challenging...

www.radioinsights.com

Also attaching my spectralgram of that MP3.

View attachment 3830

Okay, I appear to have found someone who did just that. Check the MP3 link at the bottom of this article for audio of isolated PPM tones. My, what a hell's chorus.

Is Nielsen's PPM Making Radio Unlistenable?

Is Nielsen's PPM Making Radio Unlistenable? Recently Nielsen touted ratings growth coinciding with the roll-out of enhanced PPM encoding (eCBET). According to Nielsen, the enhanced encoding, "Makes the PPM codes stronger and more robust, which improves code detection in challenging...

www.radioinsights.com

Also attaching my spectralgram of that MP3.

View attachment 3830

Uh.....uh..... I guess....uh... Thank you.....?

Seriously....thank you

 

[pjc1961]

At times I've heard the "metallic trash can sound" on the stream of iHeart's Alt 98.7 L.A. (KYSR). Most noticeable during the talk segments on the weekday morning and afternoon shows, but even the music has a shrill sound at times.

Alt 98.7 Listen Live

 

[yeoldeschool]

Wow. That is simply terrible. I could never be one of their listeners, with a sound like that. And then there's the measely 48 kbit/s bitrate they're allocating to their stream, adding its own layer of acoustic slop to the already unlistenable sound of that amped up Voltair.

What a shame, seeing professional broadcasting going in this direction. :-( This is nuts. I can't believe we're in some extreme minority of the human race with superhuman hearing. I'm just not that sensorially gifted. How can they justify spending five figures on processors that are the culminations of decades of research into masking distortion (Optimods, etc.), and millions more on professional studio facilities, boards, software, playback infrastructure, talent, etc., all to reduce the entire product to shill, slushy, grating, modulated aluminum tinfoil with a penny-pinching bitrate and a PPM enhancer dialed all the way up to "crackpipe"?

Direct link for Winamp, VLC, and other players that support the Shoutcast ICY protocol:
http://stream.revma.ihrhls.com/zc201

Direct link for modern software and OTT players that can be given HLS (m3u8) URLs:
http://stream.revma.ihrhls.com/zc201/hls.m3u8

Interesting observation: when this stream cuts away to their web-only advertising, the Voltair sound vanishes completely. And when the web stream cuts back to the main audio going to air, its return is so jarringly noticeable, it virtually slaps you in the face.