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Hi Guys,What is the clicking/sparking/pop noises in the background on XM Internet radio? I hear it on the XM feed and more prominantly on the XM AOL feed. It sounds like vinyl record pops and clicks sorta. You can easily hear it on the station "audio visions"
Could it be my ISP or modum (Comcast) or is this just unavoidable Internet noise?
Follow Ups:
The clicking sound usually happens when you choose the higher bandwidth option for better sound quality. I don't know why, because even though the data rate is supposed to be acceptable, i.e., you have high speed internet, it works better on the lower speed.
I use CDs for good quality playback of music. My peaked & tuned tube FM tuner is used for easy listening. A few local FM stations sounds remarkable on that tuner, but not highest quality compared to better CDs.As for XM Internet, I do not use that service. As for XM satellite, I have heard it through my Dish network, but local FM programing is good enough for me right now.
Not sure what that noise might be - I have XM radio over the satellite, and I don't have that problem. However I just started service about two weeks ago, so maybe I just haven't discovered it yet.In my humble opinion, XM radio is the best thing to happen to music in a long time. Sure it costs $10 per month but it's worth every penny. Sound quality is at least acceptable. Maybe it isn't as good as "the good ol' days" of FM, but that is besides the point. Variety of music and the chance to hear things I've never heard before is far more important to me than having the utmost in high fidelity.
. . . to hear new things?Believe me, we had all of that before.
That was AM up to the early '70s. A veritable vast lending library of listening (and cultural) diversity. And good sounding most of the time, too.
I've sat in too many cars lately running XM or other satellite/digital radio feeds. Even with all those Bose speakers and 14 amplifiers pumping endless megawatts everywhere, it dosen't sound all that great. The home based digital radio systems don't sound any better. Not much better than a good vintage era AM front end did. Really. Sit down with a '50s Telefunken or AM-FM Scott or Fisher tuner section, and you'll be floored. Now it's all jammed on one lousy sounding LSIC, so AM (and most FM) is deemed crap by the masses.
And for the highbrows who were into Hi-Fi back then, we had FM. Really nice uncompressed FM with plenty of live feeds and direct from the turntable broadcasts.
We had plenty of audio variety back then. Except it sounded better and we didn't have to pay for it. And most of the broadcasters were true independent stations.
Now you've still got 5000 channels - all coming from one or two vendors.
I guarantee that in under five years, you'll still be paying for your digital radio - but listening to advertising. Lots of it. Across all 5000 channels of it. Guaranteed.
That some of us now peg Redbook CD as the quality benchmark for audio speaks volumes.
People are such lemmings sometimes.
Well, I don't think I am a "lemming". Actually I think I am a smart consumer by ditching broadcast radio...why listen to something that is worthless? I don't watch TV, don't pay for cable, so XM is woth it. If XM adds commericals to the stations I enjoy, I might cancel. Under the contract you can do that for a full refund, no penalties, of any remaining months on the contract. On the other hand there is just no place to hear this kind of variety today, so it might even be worth commericals.Sound quality isn't the best, true. But, it isn't terrible. I do remember the consoles you speak of and although they were nice and rich I don't agree AM is better than FM. I care about high fidelity and AM doesn't even have a signal above - what is it - 8,000 Hz? Maybe it's 10,000, I am not sure, but it's far below the limit of the humam ear or what one gets with LPs or CDs. I don't have a 14-speaker Bose system or anything like that, I have a Scott 299 with some Bostons, and just the stock stereo in my Honda. It works OK, in the car it's no different than anything else because of road noise. At home I can tell a difference.
You may be right about FM/AM at one time, but regardless it has not been that way for a long time. Today, there is no choice unless a person is happy with songs they've heard 1,000 times or more. I work with a couple people who listen to FM all day and I don't know how they stand it. It's quite common to hear the same songs repeated after only four or five hours have gone by - and they aren't even that good to begin with. FM gives you access to maybe 0.001% of the music out there. It doesn't even reach 1% of rock music alone.
I am old enough to remember the early 1980's, at least, and since my parents weren't rich we didn't have many albums/tapes and we listened to the radio a lot. Where I grew up (central IL) variety sucked. Sure, there were two or three rock stations with playlists of maybe 250 songs, if you were lucky. Blues station? Forget it, maybe you got it a few hours one night a week on NPR. Jazz? No way - again, maybe NPR has it on Sundays or something like that, but that's all. Bluegrass? Hardly anyone knew what it was. New, breaking rock bands? Maybe, once they were already nationwide. Even then it was stuff that fit the mainstream to a T. I remember lots of Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, old Led Zepplin and Stones, Beatles, Boston, Pink Floyd, REO Speedwagon...the list goes on. (Notice this is the same stuff that's played on FM rock stations today, 25 years later - the conservatism in taste is unreal.) Some of these were good bands sure enough, but the radio didn't even play 1% of what was out there. I guess that what got played in the early 1980's wasn't bad, it's just what was completely ignored that was the problem.
XM gives me a full-time bluegrass station, a full-time old-school country station (not the Dixie Chicks), three full time Jazz stations, R&B (both old style and new, on different stations), several rock stations including your standard classic rock plus a full-time punk station, a full-time unsigned artist station, a 1940's station, a 1950's station that actually plays the stuff on Sun Records and also a lot of bands that at age 33 I had never heard before in my life (and I do like 50's stuff, I even saw the remaining members of Buddy Holly's band a few years ago.) This just scratches the surface.
Maybe FM was different in the major cities, but I doubt that it offered everything that XM does today. Certainly it couldn't have offered it all at the same time, on round-the-clock formats like XM, there just aren't that many stations. I can say that in central IL by the time 1980 rolled around FM left a lot to be desired. Today I live in Chicago but there is still no contest. We have one OK rock station (93.1 WXRT) and one NPR station in the burbs that plays jazz sometimes. It had gotten to the point where I was getting turned off by misic in general just because I was sick of the same stuff over and over. If the variety on XM drops someday, I'll probably ditch XM and look for something else, but for now, it's the best thing out there.
Enjoy the music!
Jon,
These old-timers (including me) are remembering FM pre-1970. You are correct on most points except the sound quality of digital radio. It really does stink through good electronics, but it sounds acceptable in most cars. And although the programming is much better than most broadcast, it still is not as good as it could be. After you eliminate most of the channels that have no music (talk, religion, sports, traffic) and the channels that don't fit with one's personal taste (In my case, 80s power balllads, disco, techno, modern mainstream country, etc.), how much is really left? I prefer internet radio and podcasts, sometimes with even poorer sound quality, but much greater variety.But there is no going back. Clear Channel, and IInfinity (and their awful advertisements and DJs) are not going to disappear any time soon. We can wring our hands and wish for the good old days, or we can listen to better programming right now. Isn't that your point?
Yep, my point exactly. If I want to hear new music beyond the bands that Clear Channel thinks I should hear, options are limited. My stereo system isn't that great (a Scott 299A with Boston A70 speakers) so the sound quality isn't that big of a loss, for me. Wish I could afford a truly great stereo but law school debt plus meager income prevents that from occuring. I had an ipod for a while but it broke and can't be fixed, and it's a pain to use in the car.There are a lot of stations I don't listen to on XM (and 80's power ballads are certainly one I don't tune in very often) but there are still 10 or 15 stations I rotate through fairly regularly. For $10 per month with no commericals, it's worth it to me.
You mean DIGITAL isn't perfect?well, bugger me!
This is a forum about FM radio with antennas and tuners,
Go ask some IT and internet radio geek who thinks digital IS perfect and make him explain, or the marketers who got you to buy into it, or your provider.
OR you could go look in the bloody mirror, and recognise a dick-head for buying into it. they're just NOT about quality they are about sales and maximum throughput/lowest bitrate, of CRAP.
Did YOU ever support a good local FM station? nope?
S'nap!
WarmestTimbo in Oz
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger'Still not saluting.'
Read about and view system at:
Timbo,
This is a forum about radio. We call it Radio Road, not Tuner Tunnel, or FM Farm. And yes, internet radio applies.Blaming US audiences for the problem will only get you so far. It's a chicken and egg thing. Did internet kill good radio, or did bad radio drive people to the internet? Its like asking "Did Rupert Murdoch destroy good newspapers, or did bad newspaper standards enable tabloids to replace good newspapers?" I'm lucky to live near Boston where the commercial-free college stations can pick up the slack. And near New York, where the Times is still worth reading.
Internet radio and satellite radio stations appeal is all about programming. The sound quality is really crap. We all know that. That said, I can listen to radio from around the world via the web. So thank you so much for personally saving Australian radio than the rest of the unworthy world can enjoy it too, albeit via that nasty computer that I spend most of my working life in front of.
"well, bugger me!"
No thank you. But thank you so much for Rupert Murdoch. That's similar, isn't it?
Bad overcompressed drivetime FM slop has driven the masses to worse ultracompressed digital dreck. But there's MORE of it. And people will always take quantity over quality. Yeah, it's "radio", just like a Big Mac is "beef". At least that's how it is here in the U.S.It's been so long now, that most folks just don't remember anymore how glorious uncompressed FM was in its heyday. Like being there live.
Going to the original poster's problem, it sounds like a codec choking on either excessive compression or error rates, or perhaps buffering issues from connection problems. Ahhhh . . . perfect digital audio.
The masses listen to either the beat of music, the words, but not the musical quality of the content. Slam dunk that with low quality transistor audio electronics in most mass marketed consumer electronics. Thus XM radio makes sense to the masses & especially so in an automobile with busy schedules, traffic jams, etc.
I disagree about not listening to the words for XM broadcasts...see my post above, the whole reason for getting it was to have music where I would WANT to hear and with some actual variety. It's not about a background beat; if that's all it was FM would be fine & it's free. Rather it's just to get to hear something new and to taste what's out there, besides the extremely limited formats with 50-song playlists that the large majority of FM stations use. Where else can you hear new bands, in quantity? If you're on a college campus it's not too difficult by word of mouth, but otherwise it's tough. FM sure doesn't have it.
Most musicians & audiophiles will value quality playback. The masses will not care much. Many simply like loud as they never heard quality, thus do not know quality sound at all or just do not care beyond loud.Our oldest daughter is prime example. Very intelligent, honor student, college grad, etc. She never had a comment on my high-end tube stereo vs say a large getto blaster or a $150 'Walmart' system with large, but junk speakers. I also have not asked her any questions about my system either.
The other three kids report a jaw dropping experience & two of those three are musicians plus they ask questions like crazy.
I believe my posts are accurate. My posts do not include everyone.
Yeah, a lot of people are obsessed with the beat, that is true. All you have to do is look at how popular rap and hip-hop are, that shows it right there.I wonder though how different this really is. (Please understand, NOT trying to pick an online fight...just wondering "out loud"). I see the clips of the Beatles performing in their early years and the crowds of girls screaming and almost passing out over songs like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", which was about at the intelligence level of a 6th grader, if that. I also saw the Dead a few times and beleive me, most of the fans were not coherent. Were those fans truly into the music, or just the drugs? If you took the drugs away, how many fans would there have been? If the Beatles had been ugly but otherwise released the same songs, how many records would they have sold? How much of it was really about the music, and how much something else?
I wonder if things have truly changed that much, or if we just had good popular music 35 years ago due to pure serendipity.
Things HAVE changed. It isn't about the intellectuality of the lyrics, or the coherency of the audience. Its about the fidelity of the medium and the variety of the programming. The modern market is so much more segmented, due to cable TV and the internet. 50 million people won't be watching Ed Sullivan anymore. The way that the industries chose to reach all those segments on such limited bandwidth is to distribute material digitally, and the crude state of digital playback over the last 20 years limted fidelity. What we fear is that now that listeners have grown accustomed to such low fidelity (mp3), will they ever value better fidelity again?
.
Dear Sir,I used to respect your posts.
This response and personal attack was simply uncalled for. I asked a simple question, neither endorsing nor supporting Digital radio.
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