In article , John Phillips
writes
In article , Keith G wrote:

When FM radio (2 in the evenings often and 3 most of the time) hits the
spot, which it frequently does, it really is the best 'audio' you can get
and is altogether better than any TV or digital sound!

I agree entirely on the superb quality of analogue FM broadcasts when
they do hit the spot.

However, on the subject of "better than any ... digital sound" sorry to
quibble but I believe the UK national "analogue FM" transmtter network
is fed with digital NICAM-encoded content. Assuming I'm right, even
though the transmission is analogue FM the source is still digital.
And what's more it's just 14-bit digital at 32 ksamples/sec before we
even get to the issue of 10-bit NICAM transcoding.

Which is quite OK for the 15 K that is required for the FM system. In
fact its referred to as NICAM "728" which is give or take the odd bit
the bitrate in use. Most all modern FM modulators are very high spec'ed
units these days, so not too surprising that the FM signal is as good as
it is

Course it can suffer from distortions added in via multipath etc so
that's why you still need a good aerial system to get the best from it.

If the BBC saw digital transmission as a real high quality format they'd
declare DAB to be a low quality "quantity over quality" system and make
digital satellite really motor. They could transmit linear PCM over that
and hardly notice it, they could have even used 256 K/bits like some
German broadcasters do, but we're stuck with 192 so digital quality has
a wholly different meaning when applied to broadcast

Back to BBC Radio 3 FM, I think the signal is compressed to prevent
over-deviation and keep low-level detail above the transmission system's
noise floor. It certainly sounds "warm" to me compared to DAB (yes I
know about the arguments but at least R3 gets some bandwidth). This does
not detract from my keen enjoyment of the best of R3 on FM, BTW.

Sometimes the processor settings do alter as the day wears on.....


--
Tony Sayer