I quite like the local radio station KEXP in Seattle, from my house I can see the tower the station is broadcast from about a mile away.
While I am out I can either get the 128kpbs mp3 on my phone or listen to the FM broadcast on my zune.
So my question is simply is a analogue uninterrupted FM broadcast higher or lower quality than 128kbps mp3?
Posted Jul 13, 2011, 5:53 PM UTC
Which sounds better to you?
Most FM stations are broadcasting from a digitally stored library. Additionally, most syndicated stations are nothing more than digital links to an analog tower. Unless they are using some sort of lossless compression for the library or streaming, then you are probably getting a VBR stream from the library and a CBR stream from syndication. The average of that will likely be 128kbps, and because it's being retransmitted over an analog medium after being decoded from digital, then you will lose fidelity.
I worked at a college radio station for about 2 years. Although I know this isn't industry standard (in fact, it's far from it) we broadcasted from CDs. When they were burned (legal downloads) they were high quality mp3s.
I don't know about the FM quality per se, but I can tell you sometimes we mirrored the internet stream when things didn't go well with our transmitters. When we did that, the streams were 256kbps. This is just some perspective, not really confirming or denying what you said.
This radio station has a 1.4 mbps lossless stream that I listen to at home, but it's windows media which I can't get get to work on my android phone.
They have a lossless on-line stream I would think that a good portion of their library in lossless.
[deleted]
Pretty sure non hd radio is around 64k, so the stream
It's analog, it doesn't have a sampling rate
Ok fine my bad. I have heard it compared to a 64k digital sound quality
Well, that depends on the quality of the transmitter and receiver of the FM broadcast. Since an analog signal is has no loss to sampling rate, it should be a higher quality. Although, many radio stations will compress the signal to conserve bandwidth so they can transmit farther. Basically what it comes down to is the quality of the gear used as to which is better.
Best answer here. FM quality is incredibly variable. Technically speaking FM could go from zero quality(static noise, signal below the noise floor), to perfect quality(received signal is the same as the input signal at the transmitter).
Perhaps to answer the question you need some measurement of the average FM quality.