[BC] AudioVault, Now Cascading Algorithms

[Tom Bosscher]

Powell,

    I could not agree with you more. This whole MP3 thing has caused 
considerable damage to my head, as I bang it slowly against the wall.

    Any radio station who is now recording their music, and actually 
commercial, liners, promos et all into ANYONES hard drive system, using 
any form of digital compression,  is very short sited. Yes, I have 128 
and 256 kbps MP3's on my CPU at work, and they sound great. But as you 
pointed out Powell, it is all about cascading algorithms. A CD, recorded 
down to a 128 kbps MP3, played on a high quality FM station will sound, 
not bad. Better than XM or Sirius. But run that audio through a bit 
compressed STL, and then IBOC, and you have problems.

    Here is where I would like to give out an "Atta Boy".

    Like most stations, we noticed the record labels wanted to send us 
their new releases via the Internet. Cool. But for reasons no one can 
explain, they insist on sending the songs as MP3's. WCSG in Grand Rapids 
refused to air them. Among the various methods, there is a company 
called Promo MPE, who has one very cool system for downloading the 
songs, and keeping track of everything. However, they used some 
proprietary encoding scheme. Two of my younger announcers could tell the 
difference between this coded song, and the song directly on the CD.  So 
we refused to use this system. I wrote my PD an email explaining why 
this system was not acceptable to us. He forwarded the email to Promo MPE.

    Amazingly, I got a call from Promo MPE. Great I thought, they are 
going to rip on me that "why should you care, others take our feeds?" 
That wasn't the case. One very knowledgeable person named Dean Ernst 
emailed and phoned me several times, and I expressed why I had a 
reservation. For the last ten years, every single song on our systems 
has been dubbed into the HD system, using AES-EBU, with no compression, 
digital or audio. 10.5 Megs per minute is the demand on the hard drives. 
No problem, those are cheap.

    I explained to Dean that I was amused that while the record labels 
are willing to send a CD in a special overnite envelope, costing them $ 
4 to 10 a crack. Now, they were complaining about an Internet bandwidth 
cost of around 4 cents per song. Dean came back to me and asked if I 
would accept the audio if it was compressed using FLAC (Forward Lossless 
Audio Codec). Along with others, we beta tested the new player. This 
system sounded right (my young announcers could not tell the 
difference), and "decoded" FLAC file shows the 10.5 megs per minute.

    In this day of corporations who just want to keep lowering the 
standards, I have to congratulate Promo MPE for a job well done. 
Delivering the songs via the net is the future, but there is no reason 
to lower the quality standards. An artist will use a recording studio 
worth millions, and then the label wants to kick the song out as an MP3. 
If that goes to your MP3 or Ipod player, that is fine, but just don't 
try to transcode again. I wrote quite a diatribe against the lossy 
codecs use from the labels. But again, my hats is off to Dean and his 
company. As a side note, he once caught one record label, who emailed 
them a song that sounded really wrong. Turns out someone encoded an MP3, 
then converted that back to a WAV file and sent it in. For a major 
release. What was that record company thinking?

    Powell, thank you bringing this up. If there is ANY radio station 
who thinks that digitally compressed is OK for their station, let them 
put that station in my market, and our stations will win every time. 
They can have their MP3's on the air.

I'll take my straight!

Tom Bosscher
DE Cornerstone University
Grand Rapids, MI
WCSG WAYK WAYG