[paddington]

good morning

The advertisement of "CD-quality" is a subjective assessment that cannot be quantified.

If it said "CD-spec", then we can show that it certainly is no where near that.

As far as the "quality", XM radio had to quit using "CD Quality" because so many people realized it didn't even come close to CD audio or FM Radio. It was misleading, as XM / Sirius generally sounds like shit.

DirectTV audio uses lossy data compression, meaning a good 90% of the audio bits are discarded to save bandwidth, much the same way MP3 encoding does. I think it's AC3, but it doesn't really matter which codec, if we're comparing to CD audio standards. Lossy is lossy.

TTD requires all audio torrents to be lossless (no data compression), which would exclude anything sent over satellite as none of the major services send lossless, uncompressed audio. Check the FAQ for more info.

CD Audio is 44,100 Hz @ 16 bits, 2 channels with no data compression. All the bits are there.


Calling DirecTV audio "CD Quality" is, to me, misleading, since it shares none of the characteristics of CD Audio, aside from having 2 channels. That is a judgement call but, the fact that the audio is run through lossy data compression is not. It's factual and excludes it from TTD.


If you;d like to post a 2 min sample file, I will analyze and give you an idea of what lossy characteristics it exhibits.