Over digitalized and processed music

[Peter Murray]

No radio station with competent engineering staff regularly originates
audio that is compressed. Audio is stored and played off the computer in
uncompressed form - for a number of reasons. The air chain from playback
system to transmitter can have a number of conversion points, and the use
of various compression techniques can lead to highly distorted audio
because of cascading codecs. MP3 is particularly susceptible to this.

In any case, hi-fi pop music is not going to be found on FM or satellite,
for the most part. If you want to hear uncompressed full-fidelity pop from
yesteryear, you will want to go get your CD's out of that back closet.
Broadcast audio is processed to sound best in the broadest number of places
- including your car, with its high noise floor.

In any case, there is not much uncompressed full-fidelity pop today (even
off a purchased CD), with all of the digital manipulation that happens now.

Hi-fi is not dead - it is just not going to be found on today's broadcast
media. The technical argument could be made that it never was available via
analog broadcast methods, but then we would have to technically define
hi-fi!

-Peter

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 7:11 AM, <sids1045@aol.com> wrote:

> Sorry, but that battle was lost a long time ago.  The music medium of the
> moment is bit-rate-reduced compressed MP3s listened to through earbuds with
> a frequency response only slightly wider than an old Bell 500 telephone.
>  What's worse is that now most radio stations get their music via
> downloads, and all too often those downloads suffer from the same problem.
>  The era of "hi-fi" is long gone.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Hall:
> I was driving down Memorial Drive yesterday when one of my favorite old
> songs
> Love Shack” by the B-52’s was on one of Boston’s classic hits stations, I
> could
> ardly believe my ears.....this fantastic song much like all the great
> Disco and
> ance tunes now sound the dregs. They have been through so much digital
> ompression and processing that the original life and texture is now
> missing. I
> ecall driving Revere Beach with the top down and car loads of kids would be
> anging out of cars with Love Shack cranking with them banging on the sides
> of
> he car. This song had such life and vibrancy to it, not any more.
>
>