Re: 96k for BBC stations online? I wont be tuned in!!! Anyone else?

neil-mclean@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
James Cridland does not make me see through ***, He has gone
backwards with the BBC ,if he thinks his latest efforts are better
audio than what he had at the now defunct Virgin Radio then what hope
do we have for internet radio,let alone Dab!!!!!

From what I have heard of the 96k stream, it sounds OK on my tiny little laptop speakers, but if I play it on anything better, then the deficiencies start to show. The treble lacks clarity and on my hi-fi system I can even hear an almost constant sound of artefacts just audible underneath the music. Basically 96k just isn't enough for encoding in WMA.

Apparently they are likely to reduce bit rates when they move to what they call the aac family. So it sound a lot like we are going to get low bit rate aac+. AAC+ is all very well as a way of producing listenable audio at low bit rates, but with internet bandwidth becoming ever cheaper, there isn't really any excuse for an organisation with the huge resources of the BBC to use at least 128k, which when used with aac would produce nearly CD quality.

The usual excuses seems to be, that using a higher bit rate would cause a number of users to experience more re-buffering, and then switch to another broadcaster. The obvious solution (assume the problem actually exists in the first place) is to have two streams, use a lower bit rate stream as the default stream, but allow people to switch to a higher bit rate stream if they want to. But apparently this is no good because some people are to dim to understand which stream to use. Apparently they are considering eventually introducing a system to automatically measure a listeners bandwidth, and select a stream accordingly. It will be interesting to see whether they do this, and if they do whether they come up with any more excuses to avoid providing good audio quality.

At the moment it looks a lot like Steve's is along the right lines, that they don't want to attract people away from DAB, by providing much better quality than DAB. I think the 96k stream does sound better than DAB, but not a lot better, I wonder whether that is a coincidence.

It is understandable that they can't improve the quality of DAB, but to keep the quality of ever other broadcast system down, just because of one poor system is not really acceptable. They have some how managed to degrade FM sound quality, Freeview uses a higher bit rate than DAB, but has a nasty quality about it (probably transcoding), satellite I haven't heard yet, but it is hard to see why they are only using up to mp2@192k, when there is plenty of capacity that they could use to increase bit rates, and an increase to just 256k would make a huge difference.

Basically the BBC are looking a lot like the, lets be careful not to compete with DAB corporation.

Richard E.
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