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That's nice but....

Posted by doodlebug (A) on December 7, 2006 at 08:24:38

In Reply to: Rhapsody Bit-Rates posted by Audio-Idiot on December 6, 2006 at 11:47:27:

I don't really care what Rapsody imports its songs as. I'd be more concerned with what it ships them as. This information only tells me what they started with.

I've tried the KEXP high bit rate stream, too. While I'm not that much for the music, it does provide a reference for other streams. If, however, you've heard direct recordings of bands (I do this as a side hobby), then you'll have something to compare it to. The other aspect is how well the stream's audio has been engineered to take advantage of the transport medium.

Regarding your question, compression of digital streams is different from the compression used in the broadcast industry to limit the dynamic range of the audio. I believe you've confused them in some way. Bit-rate compression will affect the bandwidth of the resulting decoded audio but audio compression will affect the dynamic range of the audio.

Frankly, the Rapsody/Sirrus/XM stuff bores me to death, content-wise and they don't offer me a quality audio experience. I do like streams like Radioio.com where I can get 128K streams of different content. Their engineers seem to have figured out a lot of the details for quality audio at that bit rate. There are some pretty good 96K streams (WGBH and KUSC) but I can hear artifacts in the decoding with my system, which I usually run when I'm working out of the house.

I'm finding that 128K streams are pretty acceptable to my ears as long as the audio in that stream has been well engineered to be run in that bandwidth. My experience with other FM radio stations that also stream their broadcasts is that their engineering department has not quite figured out the differences. I note that the AES Convention this year had a number of talks and papers presented along these lines.

BTW, I primarily use a Squeezebox 2 for most internet streaming, if that helps.

Cheers,

David

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