This is a very old topic and has been discussed here and other places many time before. Google you'll find what people think an internet stream radio would need to be to comparable with FM. Audio codec and stream speed make a big difference.
In the real world - BBC has a v. good quality stream 320kbsp AAC (44.1 IIRC) stream for Radio 3. All other National station are 128kbps. This is for UK only listeners. Non UK gets 56kbps / 32kHz. The R3 high quality stream It occassionally is opened to the world. BBVC also run WMA and Flash/AAC stream. ( IIRC WMA is 128kbps/UK and 48kbps Non UK) BBC on cable system often come from the Freeview, DAB (does UK use DAB+?) service or Satellite as the signal is already digital and easy to process. None are FM quality (e.g. DAB is MP2 and BBC used to use DAB signal for internet streams) - you need to check your cable supplier to find where they are getting the radfio and then determine the actual quality but FM will probably be better. I created a plugin for Squeezebox for the Griffin Radio Shark USB FM/AM tuner and still use it. I set it up when my local broadcaster (RTE) streamed at 16kbps mono but now most broadcast have acceptable quality streams. The difficulty these days is getting a USB radio Tuner as the need for one has gone away and there are no news ones made/sold. SDR (software defined Radio) USB devices are available and can do FM but require a reasonable processor ( radio signal processing is done in software and not hardware so these pdevices can be made to receive and process virutally any type of radio signal) but as I see it it is not worth the effort to create a plugin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bpa's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1806 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101408 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
