Natural Philosopher update BBC and Absolute radio streaming URLS?

[misterroy]

The radio 4 one I have been using has gone, do you have updates? thanks for the previous link

[Theo]

usually has them.

[The Natural Philosopher]

None of the links work any more. That's where I got them from originally.

The idea seems to be that if you want to listen to any radio today you have to buy either DAB or a brand new internet radio, or go via someone's streaming service. Like E-books, they are so hard to use that no one is.

[GB]

Or, buy an Alexa Dot for £15?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Can that feed Hi Fi to a couple of thousand pounds of loudpeaker?

[Paul]

All it's got, is a Line Out.

There is I2S inside. Because there are multiple versions of the Dot, naturally every adventure is different. A later version, the onboard device is I2S in (to internal DAC) followed by a ClassD amp for the Dot speaker.

"Hi-Fi Digital Audio from the Echo Dot"

Some I2S DACs (maybe a Wolfsen), have high impedance outputs, and that's why a good opamp goes after the DAC, for buffering into real devices. You can't drive 10K ohm inputs on a receiver, with some of the DACs directly. The DACs in that case, are around 1 megohm out. There is a small pool of enthusiasts who drool over stuff like this (messing around with every DAC they can find).

Naturally, it's garbage in garbage out, and if the content feeding the device is poor, the output would be poor no matter what you do.

Paul

[Paul]

Not on version 5 apparently.

"On the rear, a power input socket. The previous version had a headphone/audio out 3.5mm stereo socket, but it has been removed for the 5th generation model."

It has toys on it, but perhaps, not hi fidelity toys. I think it has a Bluetooth, and getting quality from Bluetooth is basically hopeless. The two ends never do what you'd like them to do.

Paul

[GB]

I'm perfectly happy with the Bluetooth output on mine, but my speakers cost only a small fraction of £2k. (That left me lots of money to buy gold-plated mains sockets, which is where quality matters.)

I am a bit confused, anyway, because DAB is mentioned. I thought that's okay quality for ordinary folk like me, but the hi fi buffs are not happy?

[Theo]

Looking at them in a browser's developer tools, it appears Absolute have a timestamp in the URL.

works, but if I trim out the &aw_0_1st.skey=1693479597 it doesn't. That number is Unix time for "Thu Aug 31 2023 10:59:57 GMT+0000" So I can't tell it to play, I have to tell it to play from a specific time (and it probably won't go back too far in the past)

There is also a tracking ID in the URL, but it works if I snip that (I did above).

For Radio4, the URL is:

this just loads fragments of audio like: So it looks like there isn't a single file that is 'play audio starting from now', it's all controlled by the Javascript on the web page.

At least, that's how the web pages do it. There may be other ways.

Theo

[charles]

and, if you believe a review in a 'hi-fi' magazine about 30 years ago, they improve stereo separation - so there.

[Brian Gaff]

I simply do not understand the mentality of this messing about interminable with streams. I notice I can only stream world servvice now unless I invoke a smart speaker. I use a skill on Amazon called radio player. Ask radio player to play station. This seems to bypass that annoying bbc sounds jingle, Same goes for stations on Tune in which now runs ads before you start to listen otherwise. Absolute have their own skill and a lot of the commercial stations are offering special pay to listen subscription offers that remove the adverts and play music instead. Honestly they will monitories breathing before long. Brian