Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo FM Radio

Sitting here listening to the radio (NPR, so it's mostly talk, but some music), and it sounds great on the M50s. No worries!

mwc,

I don't get Dish Network although my Time-Warner overpriced "package" does include 30 or so digital music channels.

All these digital services (including Sirius and XM Satellite Radio) use some form of audio "codec", a perceptual encoder/decoder that throws away a lot of data, so how it sounds depends on the codec and what data rate or the degree of data compression that's used. I know Dolby has a professional codec that is quite transparent, used to link studios in different parts of the country.

The Time-Warner channels I get sound very clean, although my listening is entirely subjective. However, I did serve on the listening panel for international tests (the ones in Canada were done by the Dept of Communications in Ottawa) of audio codecs that were tested for "transparency" for use in broadcasting and signal distribution with satellite links.

The best ones were amazingly good and ran at 320 kb/second (Dolby, I think, and one chosen for Europe called Musicam). Those were essentially transparent. The signals that caused real problems for some of the codecs that were rejected were castinets and solo female vocal a cappella (a Suzanne Vega song that I never want to hear again. . .the tests lasted several days so I heard it endlessly repeated).

Regards,

Yeah, that happens with Suzanne Vega songs.