[BC] Automation and *its* actual cost

[Kevin Tekel]

^ seeing the possessive of "it" misspelled as "it's" is one of my biggest
pet peeves, so allow me to correct it in the title...

Now then, Ron Cole wrote:
 > Well gee seems that we have been running compressed audio files since
 > the first audio hard drive systems of the early 1990s.  I don't see that
 > it ever was a real issue, aside from a cascading codex issue in the
 > early days.

The first time I ever heard codec artifacts on the air was in 1996.  After
only a few months on the air, 1660 WJDM turned its back on Elizabeth, NJ
and started airing the syndicated "Radio Aahs" kiddie format, aimed at the
NYC market.  At the time I knew their satellite feed and/or STL somehow
didn't sound right, and tended to sound a bit "gurgly".  Upon reviewing my
airchecks years later, they clearly were using MP2 at around 128 kbps.

It was a few years later, around 1999-2001, when everybody was getting on
the MP3 bandwagon, including radio advertisers.  As a result during this
era many radio commercials sounded downright putrid -- especially when the
spots would come in as low-bitrate MP3 files and would be transcoded to
MP2 for use in the station's automation system.

Speaking of which, the nation's #1 radio station, WLTW in New York, still
seems to be using 192 kbps MP2 for their music, just like they started
doing years ago, because I can still clearly hear MP2 artifacts in their
music, especially now that their audio processing is "brighter" than ever
before.  I can only imagine how bad their "HD Radio" audio must sound,
with this 192 kbps MP2 audio being transcoded to 64 (or even 48) kbps HDC!