[Five]

Originally Posted by Jackstraw_1969

This is not necessarily the case these days.

Stations compress their audio in many ways, and in most cases you have different compression "stacked" upon one another. Although MPEG2 has been the standard for 20 years in satellite delivery to the stations, I know of many stations that play MP3. Even if a station is playing CD's (44.1, no compression) it will get stepped on going to the transmitter.You don't even want to think about today's new HD radio!

To allow FM, and not XM or Sirrus seems like a double standard if you use the "compression" argument. Now what comes over the airwaves is "free", and XM and Sirrus are "services" so legally you may have to keep them off here anyway.

Thanks for the info, Jack. Going with the compression argument, older FMs are safe, perhaps the newer ones will need more investigation. We don't want to enforce a blanket ban on all FM sources since obviously there is no lossy source involved with a 1989 FM like the one I seeded recently. Should it come to light that all recent FM broadcasts have lossy in their lineage then perhaps we should make a "cutoff date". I believe, however, that there are still many FM stations that are broadcasting "traditional" non-mp3-sourced stuff.