DAB vs FM

[Tim]

Unless they have canine DNA, 44K1 is perfectly capable of encoding all frequencies an audiophile can actually hear, and absolutely certainly and without doubt all frequencies FM produces (it's cut off at about 15kHz because of the way stereo channels are encoded onto the available bandwidth). Whether it sounds better is a subjective judgement, and essentially the judgement is about the character of the analogue filtering chain - losses and noise - not the fidelity of signal reproduction. Audiophiles are a funny bunch, you can sell them expensive speaker wire when cheap mains cable would work better, and they'll swear blind it's worth the money. Religion and ego are very much involved. 

get_iplayer is great but takes a bit of getting your head around. There are a number of different formats available reflecting the range of devices the BBC supports for iplayer, and the --info option gives you a summary. --mode=flashaacstd seems to be the best for 6music, and a --raw download gives you the unreencoded stream. Well worth spending a couple of hours playing with. What you get is an .flv (flash video) file, which something like audacity can read if you have the right codecs. ".flv" is a multimedia container file format in which the original aac stream is embedded, so you need some sort of software to dig it out. 


--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, "Stuart" <stuartb@...> wrote:
>
> Yep, kind of what I was saying, with added science! I do think there are some aspects of the sound of a cassette recording of an FM broadcast made in the 80s (even after digitisation to 256-320kbps vbr mp3) which sound better than most current FM/DAB and that is nearly all down to the relative lack of dynamic range compression plus (in the case of DAB esp. 128kbps) lossy compression. Dave McCarthy in this very list explained how they used to experiment at the BBC with Optimod in the late 80s/early 90s which totally flattened the sound (and would let it run into distortion during loud passages until the levels were brought down in a delayed fashion). And why, even on my Pure portable, some internet stations sound better than any DAB and FM stations, the dynamic range trumps any slight loss of information compared to FM, and in any case many internet stations use better bitrates than DAB.
> 
> Some analogue audiophiles would claim that the 44khz CD-rate sampling is not enough to capture the full waveform at higher frequencies...
> 
> It is very disappointing that a serious music digital-only station partakes in the loudness war .... perhaps time for a campaign?!
> 
> Incidentally, this getIplayer thingy, is this accessing a different stream to proper iPlayer that it has higher bitrates? Or is it only how it is re-encoded?
> 
> Stuart