[4candles]

Originally Posted by Five

thanks for the link... what I really need to get is a sample of audio that is confirmed NICAM. The info in the link is based on technology from 1993 I'm wondering what is happening now in 2005 and who is broadcasting using it these days.

NICAM is used to provide digital stereo sound with analogue TV broadcasts in the UK. So any stereo recording from UK TV before about 2001 (i.e. before digital TV with MP2 audio became popular) will be NICAM sourced.

Back at STG there was much discussion about lossy sources. One of the topics that obviously had to come up is that FM broadcasts look a lot like mp3 because they cut off around 15kHz. The differences that can be spotted are the carrier ("red stripe") up high and the fact that the cutoff (aka "haircut" in SA) of an FM broadcast is uneven. Most importantly, while an FM broadcast looses a lot of dynamic response and high frequencies, that's about all. Mp3 actually digs in and finds pieces of audio to remove below the steep cutoff to further reduce the quality. Old FM is "lossy" in a sense, but not in the sense that mp3 and the like is lossy. When TTD was started there was much discussion about allowing webcasts and "best source" broadcasts from mp3-like sources and it was decided that we would keep STG's standard of not allowing them.

You forgot to mention the heightened noise floor and the dynamic range compression applied by the broadcaster. DRC is generally not used on digital radio.

I'm always in two minds about TTD's "no digital broadcasts" policy. I seed a lot of "original bitstream" MP2 radio recordings at dimeadozen, but I don't seed them if I see that an FM recording is available. So on one hand, I agree that FM sources can be better, but I disagree with banning digital sources outright, because I think they are more than "good enough" if nothing better exists.

A digital broadcast is the equivalent of a broadcaster giving me (for example) a 192kbps MP2 copy of the master tape. This obviously isn't as good as a FLAC copy of the master tape, but IMO it isn't bad enough to be thrown away.

TTD seems to me to be very US-centric (for example, there are almost no PAL DVD torrents apart from my recent Live8 recordings), which probably explains why there is no demand for digital radio recordings - analogue radio still seems to be the norm in the US, apart from the subscription-based digital satellite services, which seem to have a poor reputation for audio quality.

But radio in Europe is very different, which I think explains Dime's more tolerant attitude towards digital broadcasts (Dime seems more Euro-centric). There are 1000s of free digital radio stations in Europe (and almost no subscription stations), and a digital-only future seems to be very close.

There are still some FM tapers (as the REM broadcast showed), but the number seems to be very small, and I would be surprised if it increased.

Going back to the subject of this thread, I don't think it is possible any more to generalise about FM radio - as your various examples are showing, there is a large variation in quality and "lossiness", even with the same radio station. So all you can probably do is to take each torrent as it comes.

At least with digital radio, you know exactly what you're getting, and tapers can easily make a "lossless recording" of the original compressed bitstream, thereby avoiding any more loss in audio quality.