OT: Radio Playout

Ohhh.. no! You want one of these new smart C3 Pluriels! Nice little car, but unfortunately you can only get 4 people in them! I'd quite like one but I haven't managed to win the lottery yet, so I haven't got £11,995 to fork out for it - plus the fact I learnt earlier today that I'm £12.50 overdrawn in the bank!

Over at Media UK the argument is using MP3 over WAV is going to reduce the sound quality. My opinion on this is, why?! I've got some 192 MP3s playing on my headphones in Winamp right now, ripped off one of my CDs. No difference whatsoever.

But what do you think?

I suspect the argument is that when you introduce further compression, such as in the chain to the transmitter and DAB you will find that compressing an already compressed format can have undesirable results.

I work on my school radio station (1386KHz BTW) and we still use CDs and do all the mixing manually.

Selector is actually the name of the scheduling software by RCS, it's been going for donkeys and is still the "industry standard" for scheduling music. RCS's playout system used to be called Master Control, although I don't know if it still is. I saw it in use in a station in Chester just the other week.

As for as formats are concerned, compression has been used over the last 10 years because of hard disk cost. Traditionally, the compression was often done by hardware, mainly because the PCs of the time were not upto realtime decoding. Examples of codecs used in those days are MP2 and APT-X (not exhaustive).

Then we moved into the software compression phase, this meant that packages were no longer tied to hardware, and this brought computer automation into a whole new price scale. Some progams will let you use pretty much any codec, I know Myriad used to reccomend IMA ADPCM (4:1 compression ratio), but there are several others. MP2 continued to be a favourite but as far as I'm aware MP3 has never been seriously used by the professionals, it requires quite a lot of processing to decode and the quality is not really good enough. You might not be able to spot the difference on your £8 walkman headphones through your £12 sound card, but trust me even at 192k (which I agree is very good) there are artefacts.

Even more so (as another poster said) if there are other compression bottlenecks in the processing chain. As far as I'm aware, more and more stations are moving away from any form of compression (mainly for this reason); disk space is no longer an expensive commodity, and as disk access times and networks speeds become faster there is no issue pulling off several 44.1kHz/16 bit/stereo files at once. There are also other advantages in that you can edit files on your system without causing any quality loss (with compressed files a decompress/compress cycle would reduce the quality), and also it's quicker to set up, since you can bypass the compression phase.

That's all very true, although WMA, the format that at least two stations I've been involved with, i agree has artefacts in the compression, have incredibally clear and clean output once it goes to transmission.

RCS and Enco, are what I'd rate as the best automation and playout systems on the market to radio stations to date.

You can't tell compression. I have lots of 192 MP3's on Winamp ripped off of my CD collection and downloaded... I really cannot tell the difference a bit. And I'm using £30 monitoring headphones to listen to it.. I am using a DSP plugin but I like the compressed "radio" sound so that's why I use it.

Ok so with a £12 sound card and £30 headphones you can't tell, but believe me with pro gear and a good ear you can! Decent headphones start at a ton.

Also, as I said, it's possible there is other digital compression in the transmission chain, like for example a landline or a microwave link from the studio to the transmitter. All these cycles reduce the quality so if you can eliminate one of them then why not.

I have to confess I've never heard of a station using WMA for source material, I've always found it to be atrocious quality, although admittedly I've never experimented with it in any detail.

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Compression of any form really hurts my ears. Makes me feel like I've got cotton wool in them. Compression on FM Radio has for years been atrocious (Damn the evil Optimod and its minions to Hades). I have tapes from early 90s Radio 1 that sound as if their top-end is clipped at 10Khz. In the early-late 80s (back in the days when R1 and R2 shared an FM frequency), their output was as clear as your own turntable or cassette deck (or even CD player), at home. Once they got their own frequency they, and everybody else, started to reduce their sound quality more and more and more. The dynamic range is now so restricted that it sometimes sounds no better than a strong Medium Wave signal, albeit in stereo.

I'm amazed how bad the digital streams on DTT sound aswell on some stations - mainly Radio 1 of course. Mind you, as one of the mighty members of the Doctor Who Restoration Team said on their forum a while back, "it won't be long before we get used to RealPlayer-quality video on the television". And it's already happening.

The Top 40 was on Radio 2's FM frequency - nothing else.

You can hardly call 2 hours a week 'sharing'!

If you do not compress, the volume levels are all over the place. I do not want to listen to the radio whilst constantly having to ride the volume k-n-o-b.