Meteors first Peel Session / poor digital quality

[thebarguest]

I agree Ali. The quality of digital/internet radio is poor.
160kbps ? Sounds more like 64 to me and there's a tinny/metallic
feel, a bit like the old medium-wave/AM. Some Peel shows from 
2002/03/04 doing the rounds sound like that, sadly ; if only they'd 
been taped from analogue FM on a 1978 music-centre !

I think I read a few years ago that analogue FM (old Peel shows)
was/is equivalent to 192/44 - makes sense to these 46 years-old ears.

Old, well-recorded FM tapes (like the recent ones offered here by 
Kevin, Julian and others) encoded at 128/44 sound fine to these ears, 
as good as the original tape. Anything less than 128/44 and you're 
detracting from the original tape I think. I personally have
converted tapes to 192/44 and 320/44 (special items) - just to be
on the safe side ...............


--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, "Alasdair Macdonald" 
<wewalkforonereason@...> wrote:
>
> 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).
>