Everybody says just stream it on your phone. OK, I'm old school and tried it last week. Is it just me, or does the sound quality of the steamed station sound noticeably poorer than the OTA sound? I'm specifically taking about FM music stations. Spoken word, I found comparable to AM talk stations. I was using Bluetooth to stream. Do you need different equipment to get good quality sound?
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Quality of Android Auto vs FM OTA
- Thread starter RadioGuy1864
- Start date
Sometimes. A few misguided stations treat the stream as a red-headed stepchild and use a low bit rate or process it poorly or not at all.
Purely technologically speaking, Bluetooth can and should sound better than analog FM. No noise, no breakups, better dynamics.
Depends on the Bluetooth. I'm assuming we're talking in a vehicle. There have been range and signal strength improvements over time.
Bluetooth Technology: Getting Better With Age
There have been various updated Bluetooths over the years, but they all have two things in common: Backward compatibility They allow devices to communicate wirelessly The most current Bluetooth, Bluetooth 5.0, has three versions alone, which have been released between 2019 and 2021.
It's only in the last five years that I've stopped connecting via USB every single time.
If this is in a vehicle, and you don't like the audio quality via Bluetooth, try connecting with a good USB cable.
This site lets you sort different station streams by their bitrate. A higher bitrate number means better quality. Despite the name of the site, it has listings for AM stations too :
FMSTREAM - The Radio Stream Directory
Easy access to live radio. Free, non-commercial, no tracking. About 100.000 stations, 200.000 streams. Select bitrate, list frequencies. Aiming to include all available streams of each program. One of the biggest resources on the internet.
fmstream.org
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The biggest problem with FM is not in the band itself, but in the processing. It varies from station to station, market to market. Every time I go from Northern California down to L.A., I'm blown back in my chair by how aggressive the audio processing is compared even to San Francisco stations in similar formats.
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