Radio equipment

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

In message , "J. P. Gilliver (John)" writes: []

Oops, Wave_Finder_, Though there are still none on ebay! (One power supply.)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It's in stereo here.

[NY]

It may vary at different times of day, but now (12:30 on Sunday) from Bilsdale it's 128 kbps in stereo with a sample rate of 48 kHz - according to VLC's "Current Media Information | Codec" from a test recording made using Windows Media Centre.

128 kbps is a bit low: I'd tend to say that 192 or 256 is the minimum for good sound. BBC1 uses 256 and Channel 5 uses 192 for the audio part of the TV broadcasts.

[Jim Lesurf]

At times DAB R4 is down to 80 kbps mono.

Jim

[Brian-Gaff]

Re bit rate of mp3. The problem is not the frequency response its phase and possitional information I find that suffers. The very fast rates over 300 kbits second can be very good, but by the time you get to that resolution you are not really saving much over a lossless codec. I can clearly hear 128kbits sec swizzling on complex sounds and acoustic environments. it reveales itself because its really regular and fast, a bit like the phase jitter you got on some cassette machines as the tape weaved a little.

192 is not bad, but still a bit muddled on a very good recording. The problem is today that one gets to feel that somewhere in the production of content, digital bit rates have been compromised or maybe converted from one format to another and not very well, making the end result less good than it could have been. I also suspect that some distribution systems also tends toward lossy or severely error corrected systems of squeezing more down the pipe so to speak.

We are never told of course so people think what they are hearing iswhat they are going to hear in real life. I can remember being shocked at the clarity and dynamics of, for examply, The James Last Orchestra when I went to a concert with my Mother once. You could really hear percussion and everything else where it actually was no kind of defocussing cos it was in front of you. Of course electronic instruments can be distorted and of course distortion is part of some music deliberately, but its when the recording medium intervenes that things get very awkward. The over use of the digital pitch enhancers and digital auto double track is irking me a lot. They use it imappropriately like on a recent concert by Carole King where half the sound that appeals is that she rasps slides and croks. You don't want it to sound pure after all its called emotion!

Sorry these things wind me up. Brian

[Mark Carver]

Interesting, back in February when Classic FM and LBC joined DTT, they were both 64k Mono.

Something must have moved off COM 5 since then to allow Classic FM up the food chain ?

What rate/mode is LBC at present ?

[Woody]

You could be right Mark - since I first heard it in mono I haven't bothered to listen on Freeview.

[Vir Campestris]

Yes, and that's MP2, not MP3...

80kbit AAC or WMA would be marginal to me. It's just too low for those formats - and I kind of like having stereo. For me DAB is nearly dead - we never bother to record anything for later now, which we used to, as it's easier to stream it in higher quality.

Andy

[Bill Wright]

You can still hear the left/liberal/greenybollocks bias though.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

I didn't know you were a nun.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

I like LBC.

Bill

[The Natural Philosopher]

yeah. Even Sky this morning had a bit on the climate conference in Paris

- in the studio an incoherent dork dweebling along the lines of 'heads of state wouldn't be there unless it was important' and then a FOE - I mean really, nit even Greenpeace, FOE - wittering on about how governments are failing to do what almost all of their electorates want ....as if.

[Brian-Gaff]

Neither did I. I've often wondered what the folk did in the convent.

Brian

[Chris J Dixon]

I suppose I was imagining the impossible - being able to summon up whatever source I wanted, from wherever I was, but with minimum technology, which clearly isn't going to happen.

Looks like my exist>Yes. Needs to be backed up - in the cloud, on another drive, or on >optical media.

No problem - I have an Office 365 subscription, which comes with far more storage than I will fill. It took a while to get the initial data uploaded, but updates are much more manageable.

Chris

[pamela]

Don't give up your search just yet.

Another option is to buy a ?100 Android tablet and play Internet radio by "casting" the audio to your PC or stereo via a ?30 Chromecast audio stick which plays through your stereo. This wouldn't cost much more than a decent DAB radio.

This arrangement gives you a portable device with a far better user interface than any DAB radio plus.

It's true that this setup doesn't have the sheer simplicity of hitting the ON switch and pressing a preset button but BBC iPlayer Radio on Android is remarkably easy to use and brings a lot of additional catchup features.

Another advantage of such a setup is that it's unlikely to become obsolete soon.

[John Williamson]

You actually trust Microsoft with all your data?

I checked on whether Office 365 would do what I want and it turned out that if I couldn't get an internet connection, I had no access to my data. The same with Outlook.com. So I paid for a decent system that keeps all my data local and secure, unless I deliberately let it out. Even my phone doesn't use the cloud for anything even remotely private.

I just synchronise my computer with a network attached HD or another computer every time I close down, and haven't lost any data due to hardware failure in 30 years or so. In fact, my system makes it almost impossible to *deliberately* lose any data, as it gets restored the next time my sync software connects to a copy anywhere on the network.

[Chris J Dixon]

Do I trust MS not to do something unwanted with the data I have uploaded? It is a risk I am willing to take.

Is it my only backup? Certainly not. I have both NAS and USB HD for regular backups.

In the event of the unthinkable (I suppose I have actually thought it) then whatever I can get back from off site is worthwhile.

Chris

[News]

In message , Chris J Dixon writes

You and me both, Chris. Just one requirement to add - the ability to play the same thing all over the house without wires everywhere, so that I can wander from room to room without missing whatever is playing.

We have had fun with a Chromecast Audio [1], and the above would be at least partially solved if one could cast to more than one device simultaneously. Anyone know whether that is possible?

[1] Except when that little scote who calls me Dad sits there quietly playing with his phone, and I discover he has deleted my queue and added all his old crap :-)

[Alan White]

Find DropBox very good.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'm not convinced by the audio quality of many of these sort of devices. The digital to analogue side often leaves a lot to be desired.