[wazoo2u]

Originally Posted by Five

We use the term "lossy" a little loosely in the community... we are normally referring to 1990's lossy a la realmedia-mp3-ogg vorbis-vqa-etc. This is the kind of lossy that we're cracking down on. Hope this helps.

I think that we can generally agree that if the source is "FM", it's being distributed because the availability of the "Pre-FM" source is limited or unavailable. Obviously, there are different qualities of FM recordings, depending upon the type of recieving/recording equipment and the reception conditions.

All FM broadcasts are "bandwidth limited", which differs from "lossy" in the fact that full spectrum audio is bandpassed without psychoacoustic algorithms being employed to fool your ear to think all frequencies are present. Yes, limiting and compression are very prevelant in the broadcast chain, especially in the STL, but if they're analog links, they are simply amplitude envelope controls, and the basic spectrum is still passed (within the FM carrier restrictions, of course). Adding digital compression techniques that might be enountered in ISDN links as mentioned, will add an unknown factor, but I would assume that most stations would want a lossless path to their transmitter.

Could MP3 play a role in timeshifting and replaying a live concert ? It's certainly possible, but an MP3 frequency falloff might be visable before the bandpass limit, so .......

So the unknown processing in the FM path does raise questions, but all things considered, it usually means it's a recording of the most readily available source, not necessarily the best possible.