The Temptations Test Of Streaming
Written Aug. 10, 2010 by Sean Ross in Internet Radio + Mobile Media + Technology with 2 Comments
I don't claim to hear radio station processing like a Chief Engineer, but as the former PD of an R&B Oldies station in the mid-'90s, it was usually easy to tell when something was wrong. Our Motown hits, cut in the era of hard stereo separation, usually had something missing. On the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back," the "all I want/all I need" bridge would be missing half of its call-and-response. Or Junior Walker would ask "what does it take?" and get a barely audible answer. Even if the Motown hits had been engineered for a mid-'60s AM transistor radio, everybody knew what those songs were supposed to sound like and they weren't supposed to feature The Jackson 3, The Two Tops, and Jr. Walker and the All-Star.
Fifteen years later, I'm hearing a lot of processing issues on radio station streams. I hear stations where the jock or stagers are at dramatically different levels from the music. Or where mid-'60s songs often lose half their content. If you have ever listened to a station at your desk at an office-appropriate level and not known that station was playing "My Girl" by the Temptations until the vocals came in, you know what I'm talking about.
Radio stations, of course, have other issues with their streaming. If your station is not subjecting me to 13 minutes of hardsell PSAs in the second half of the hour, and the otherwise-very-good radio station that prompted this post was not, then what's a few bars of intro between friends? (Even if it is one of the greatest intros of all time.) And we've only recently made the transition as an industry from barely allowing our PDs enough time to hear what goes out over their air to now holding them responsible for what's on the stream.
Listeners are not themselves audiophiles these days. They listen to MP3s through earbuds and hear your station stream through tiny speakers. It doesn't mean that something doesn't register as "wrong" to them when things are out of kilter. I also hear station streams with a lot of oomph, even under less-than-ideal circumstances. Part of the genius of the original Motown records is the famous quality control process that made them sound great on a '60s transistor radio. And part of the quality control process for radio today is making a station sound great on the transistor radio's 2010 equivalent.
Reader Comments
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It always amazes me how much emphasis is put on the on air product of a radio station, when the online presentation is lackluster. Streams that have horrible codec artifacts, levels that jump all over the place, along with distortion and hum.
Omnia makes a nice software based 3 band audio processor (Omnia A/X) that will work with almost any consumer grade soundcard on a Windows 2k/XP box. It sounds pretty good, and would do wonders for any station trying to stream decent quality audio on a budget. Just remember to get a good matchbox to feed the soundcard to avoid introducing any additional issues (phase cancellation). I also recommend the MBL software audio processors - I use MBL-2 (4 band) on wnjofm.com & at 107.7 WRRC for the webstream, with great results on both streams.
Also - the source material is very important when streaming...cascading artifacts can become very apparent when a MP2 or a MP3 is being re-encoded for the webstream. Try to make sure as much material is uncompressed , and it will do wonders for the audio quality. What the AM or FM air signal masked comes thru easily on a stream.
-Tom
At KZRM I use a feed from the off-the-air high quality tuner that feeds the studio. So the stream has the same quality and compression as the air. Aphex 2020 being driven by a dbx limiter.
Solid bass with lock tight levels.