Hello Anne, fellow Norwegian! There are several reasons radio sounds bad. The main reason is multiband dynamic compression. The more commercially oriented the station is, the louder the sound is (to attract listeners). There is mainly one way to make the station loud, and that is dynamic compression. The worst stations run 10:1 compression, turning 60 dB dynamic range into 6 dB of mush.
An then - this crap (which is usually a 256 kbps stream before is leaves the radio station) is reduced to a low bitrate, 96 kpbs or even lower. Low bitrate always sound bad, with any codec. In my ears, nothing below 160 kbps sounds natural. I listen mostly to the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, which use 48 and 160 kbps bitrate WMA. The stations P1 and P2 sounds rather ok. The best, and my faourite, is "NRK Klassisk" which use 320 kbps WMA and very little dynamic compression. The sound here is very close to CD-quality indeed. -- StigErik ------------------------------------------------------------------------ StigErik's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16340 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=46935 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
