Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , tony sayer

wrote:
In article , Jim Lesurf jcgl@st-
and.demon.co.uk writes


Well, the measurements I've made show clear level compression on R3
FM during the day. e.g.

[snip]


I reckon that this is a bit of a difficult one for a broadcaster as
they in order to serve their audience have to take into account
typical listening conditions for the majority of people during the
day and I'd bet that there aren't that many serious listeners who
sit down and listen to the audio systems during the daytime hours,
but there are a whole lot more who are in car and have the tranny on
for background stuff in the day, so who should they serve for best
effect?.

That was the purpose of including DRC in the DAB specifications. A
recent statemend I've had from the BBC claims they *do* use this on
R3.

Alas, for DRC to have much value on DAB, the results with it
disengaged should be of a good enough quality to merit listening
seriously...

Since there is no DRC on FM, the BBC used to choose *not* to
compress. The argument being that it was left to the listeners to
decide how to listen. Nothing to stop manufacturers selling car
radios with level compressers.

Now they simply impose in on all. When you think about it, this is a
parallel to the way they have treated DAB listeners.


Complaining about DAB? Welcome to the club.....


Of course what they ought do is make a very high bitrate and
un-processed source available on satellite for such serious users,
and use compression on DABble which doesn't matter anymore as its no
longer a serious audio medium.

The problem now is that - even if the BBC do currently offer higher
bitrates and no level compression via other broadcating chains (like
DTTV) - their behaviour gives no reason for confidence that this will
continue.


A senior BBC Reception Advice engineer once said on the phone that he was
confident that they would never reduce the bit rates on satellite, and
although that's no guarantee that they won't (you will have a long wait
trying to get guarantees from BBC execs...) there just isn't any reason why
they would reduce the bit rates on satellite. They've got 231 Mbps of
capacity on satellite, and *all* of their radio stations only consume about
0.7% of that.

There is actually a very strong argument for them providing at least Radios
1-4 on satellite at 256 kbps, and they could very easily provide high bit
rates across the board if they wanted to.


Hence should I or anyone else spend money buying equipment
to exploit this only to risk it evaporating shortly afterwards?


Yes.


The difficulty here is that the BBC are establishing a track record of
being 'unreliable' as well as showing no real concern for quality.


The bit rates of BBC radio stations on digital satellite have never been
reduced to my knowledge, and nor are they likely to be reduced in future
because there's no reason for them to do so.

The only thing that has happened here is that the bit rate of Radio 3 has
been reduced and Radio 3 listeners are simply being treated similarly to
listeners of all the other radio stations (although R3's bit rate is still
higher than all the other BBC music stations).

The thing that has been established is that the DAB system is not up to the
job. You can argue all day that DAB can sound good, but if it doesn't then
it's a moot point. And to be honest, it was already established that DAB
wasn't up to the job, but some Radio 3 listeners such as yourself were
simply ignoring the fact that 98% of all stereo stations on DAB were being
broadcast at 128 kbps, and sound dire.


--
Steve - www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - Digital Radio News & Info

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