Czech Radio upstages BBC

Music Lane

It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes.

I'm really late to the party with this news, but I've been noticing Tony Lauck's posts on the Digital and Hi-Rez forums here about the Czech Radio broadcasting with LOSSLESS FLAC compression. I finally did a search today and found a discussion from three years ago on a board where some Brits were complaining that the Czech Radio had left the BBC in the dust, as far as the audio quality of their internet broadcasts was concerned. At the time, I guess the BBC was only broadcasting in 120kbps mp3. I can now receive BBC broadcasts at 320kbps, but that's still a far cry from what the Czechs are doing. In fact, the Czech Radio stream has the capability to be slightly BETTER than CD quality (16/48, rather than 16/44.1). So far, I've just been listening for about an hour and a half, and all they've been playing so far is CD's, so they must be having to convert the 16/44.1 of the CD's to the 16/48 of their stream. I wonder if they ever do live broadcasts in the 16/48 resolution without conversion?

Anyway, even though it's already been going on for three years, this is an exciting discovery for me. Finally, lossless compression on internet audio streams! BTW, for a Mac guy like me, this FLAC stream will not play on iTunes (iTunes doesn't do FLAC), but it will play just fine via VLC media player - and it sounds great fed through the big speakers of my main system. I guess the proof of the pudding was that my cat, who usually doesn't pay too much attention to internet broadcasts, whipped his head around towards the speakers when the announcement of the musical selection came on, as if he thought there was an actual person in the room!

Here's the link to the Brits discussing this:

http://hddaudio.net/viewtopic.php?id=181

And the actual link to the Czech Radio stream is as follows:

http://radio.cesnet.cz:8000/cro-d-dur.flac

Finally, here is the English version of the Czech Radio site:

http://www.rozhlas.cz/english/portal/

Sorry you'll have to copy and paste, because the links aren't live - I forgot how to make them live, and I'm too lazy to look it up tonight. ;-)

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Topic - Czech Radio upstages BBC - Chris from Lafayette 20:14:23 07/09/12 (4)

I keep getting a dark-grey screen with a central black window with an X and under that - Timbo in Oz 18:15:16 07/26/12 (0)

RE: Czech Radio upstages BBC - Amphissa 19:21:48 07/10/12 (2)

It didn't work for you? - Chris from Lafayette 19:44:25 07/10/12 (1)

Odd - Amphissa 15:49:15 07/11/12 (0)

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