[peel] Re: Meteors first Peel Session

[Alasdair Macdonald]

2008/6/5 Martin Wheatley <martinw@...>:
> At 01:13 05/06/2008, you wrote:
>
>>Four of the five tracks were broadcast on Brain Surgery on Radio 6
>>last week. I grabbed them
>>from "listen again", but the quality is not great (65kbps stream ->
>>128kbps mp3). However,
>>if no-one has a better quality (and complete) version, I'd be happy to post.
>>
>>Pad
>
> I've got an original recording which also misses one of the 5 tracks
> Fortunately not the same one as the one Marc Riley didn't play
> I have therefore been able to assemble a file with all 5
> I'll put it up at the weekend  (it's getting crowded up there so I've
> got to delete a lot first!)
>
> The quality thing is an interesting question.  Anyone's original
> recordings of sessions of this vintage will have to have been recorded
> to tape and then switched to a computer file  (mine all came from
> cassette to mp3).  It is therefore unlikely that they are better than
> anyone's rip from Listen Again done with modern tools

Perhaps you underestimate the quality of some off-air analogue
recordings. Or overstate the quality of current digital broadcasts.

Better than converting a 65kbps stream to another lossy format would
be capturing the 65kbps stream in its native format. And bett than
that would be capturing the DVB broadcast in its native format -
160kbps mp2.

For most old time Peel listeners (myself included) the failings of
even the 160kbps stream are much less apparant than if we were the
same age as when the original recordings and broadcasts were made.
Even so, I fall firmly into the analogue camp and I strongly prefer
(most of) my own off-air recordings to contemporary digital
rebroadcasts.

In my experience, opinion is generally split: whereas those with
impaired hearing may care less, and those who value the size of ones
collection over quality may care less, there is a healthy group that
strongly prefer lossless analogue-sourced recordings. And actually,
that split is predictable, from a marketers point of view, in that
digital broadcasting is designed to create the least amount of
complaints (about quality) at the cheapest price. And despite this,
BBC Radio 3 listeners DID complain vociferously.

If you were to offer me lossy files at 256kbps - the quality used by
digital BBC TV broadcasts (and the BBC undoubtedly have high quality
encoders) - I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference in most
cases. 192kbps - well, maybe. But at the bottom end, I'm shocked that
there are people who can't tell the difference between 128kbps
encoding and the original source, and even at 160kbps, XFM (to name
but one broadcaster) use such a poor quality encoder that - again -
deep shock is my first and continued reaction.

Here, for instance, are current bitrates from some of the Sky satellites:
http://www.linowsat.co.uk/0282/all/0282.shtml
No doubt Freeview data is available on other sites (6 Music is also
160kbps on Freeview, I know that for sure).

Anyway - to return to the issue of the 6 Music rebroadcasts - it is
possible to capture the original 160kbps streams; there are a fair few
such DVB captures (both DVB-S and DVB-T) on www.dimeadozen.org (and
there are plenty of FM masters there also).