Sunday afternoon - not being religious, and getting bored with R4, I turned to World Service, which is quite good and there have been some interesting programmes. However, the DAB audio quality is diabolical.
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Although I try (mostly successfully) to avoid social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc., it must be noted that this forum still represents a form of social media. I do wonder if anyone at the BBC monitors it, and perhaps occasionally acts on it. After I posted on Sunday, I thought the audio quality did improve later on in the afternoon, maybe as the channel morphed into sports material. Just possibly someone acted on seeing my post - though I wouldn't necessarily think there was a connection.
I checked again this morning, and the audio quality on World Service is still not ultra high, but it's just about acceptable - at least intelligible, and the actual programme content is rather good. I could even be persuaded to listen to that more often - some of the reports are really good. Just a pity about the kind of thin "paper and comb" effect round some of the voices. The quality does seem to be codec related, rather than signal related, which gives more of a bubbling mud effect in marginal signal reception areas.
What codecs are the BBC using for DAB on World Service? Presumably the standard codecs, but with an abysmally low bit rate, and maybe not stereo, or if stereo - then joint stereo. I hadn't until now checked the audio quality on the internet streaming versions of this particular radio channel. However, I went looking for it, http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldserviceradio - and found a few problems. Firstly the World Service still seems to link to the now defunct BBC Radio Player, so one has to access the content viat the progamme pages. Here is one - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0355knp - which actually clearly suffers from audio limitations which can be nothing to do with DAB. The problems may be made worse by DAB distribution, but it is unlikely to be helped if the source material is already compromised. It may be that the source material is high quality, but is degraded before it either reaches the Internet or DAB distribution systems.
This is really not very acceptable - it should be possible to achieve higher quality - though we know that the BBC is "cutting costs" but that shouldn't automatically mean a quality reduction. Maybe this is a test to see if anyone notices! -
i heard a snatch of World Service on DAB and also thought the quality of reproduction was very poor. Perhaps justified if people are connected from the other side of the globe (but not if in a Studion in the USA, surely?).
They've vacated Bush House - are they operating from the latest tech Broadcasting House? I suggest lodging a complaint. I might do so myself - the quality of sound was really poor and I'm not convinced that its down to DAB - which is normally acceptable enough for speech radio.....Comment
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I've been listening to it, on and off, all morning on the kitchen DAB. The audio quality is very variable - I don't know why that should be the case. One minute one can hear very poor quality speech, then a minute later something much better. I'm not talking about in the street interviews either - some of them are almost certainly from within the UK, probably within a studio environment.
I think I could do better - and indeed have recently been recording a live concert, and as far as I can tell the quality at its best is better than than that provided on World Service during its low spots.Comment
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The Word Service is encoded at 64kbps mono mp2 for DAB. It's not surprising that is sounds pretty awful.Comment
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That's a real shame. I suspect that corners are cut in the internet streams, too.Originally posted by Bryn View PostComment
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