Disbeliever
pfm Member
BBC RADIO 3 :Anyone know which CD /SACD player is used for Record Review Saturday mornings.
Almost everything in broadcast is file based these days.
Amazing what sending it down the airwaves to R3 (albeit digitally) does for s.q. On Saturday afternoons, from 4 to 6 ish, there's a mix of recorded and live jazz. Detectable on my 01, but really not a lot of difference with good recorded material (presumably file-based).
Sending the sound via the airwaves smooths out the rough edges of the digits.
The further you are from the transmitter the better because more of the rough edges get taken off the further the waves travel.
Surprised you didn't know that.
A eureka moment indeed ! Following your logic, if you stray out of transmission range, ALL the rough edges would be smoothed.
As far as I know it only enters the analogue domain at the transmitter, having been distributed in whatever the modern version of NICAM is.
That's why real radio enthusiasts have very big aerials, so that they can pick up the furthest possible transmitter - get it?
Been thinking about this lately. For all the money I spend on other sources, by far the best sound I ever get is a good FM BBC broadcast . I assumed everything other than live broadcast is file based - so what kit do they use in the studio ?
Whatever they use, it's all transmitted over a 13 bit digital link anyway, so it's presumably more or less irrelevant.
Is this still true? I know it was in the past. For the digital aac stream I believe it’s 24/48 before encoding. Is this still reduced to 13:16 or whatever before fm broadcast?Whatever they use, it's all transmitted over a 13 bit digital link anyway, so it's presumably more or less irrelevant.
Sure. There was a good reason to invent the 13 bit coding when the rest of the system was analogue. Now that the front end is all digital anyway I just assumed that they might have got rid of it or unpgraded the codec.Yes, NICAM is still used: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2016-01-35-million-people-didnt-notice-a-thing-dot-dot-dot
The reason it uses the lossy compression system that it does is that the quantisation noise caused by dropping some of the bits is comparable to the signal/noise ratio of FM transmission.