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Highest quality ever radio station internet stream

Y

yeoldeschool

@KilowattKat recently mentioned an oldies station in Walled Lake, Michigan called WPON-AM. On a whim, since I'm always intrigued by any oldies stations mentioned on RD, I decided to pay its site a visit and sample its internet stream.

Oh ... my ... god.

You people need to hear how good this thing sounds! Initially, I couldn't believe my ears, but after poking under the hood with ffmpeg, the reason for what I was hearing became insanely obvious. Their crazy, wonderful engineer is encoding WPON's stream in the AAC-LC format at its absolute maximum bitrate of 512 kbit/s. No, it's not an encoder accidentally set for 7.1 surround encoding, which would ordinarily explain a bitrate that high. Nope. This is genuine 2.0 stereo at 512 kbit/s. And it sounds like a compact disc player dumping lossless bits straight into your speakers.

45 second aircheck of one of their promos:
https://files.catbox.moe/5l3rd1.m4a

2 minutes of Cat Stevens:
https://files.catbox.moe/cuz9bj.m4a

Has anyone ever heard a lossy internet radio stream packing such laser crisp, focused, sharp, and tight sound as this one? It's possibly the best sounding radio station audio I've ever heard period, considering analog FM and even IBOC HD could never hope to achieve such fidelity, and that no other internet stream I've encountered to date has ever been configured to run so "audiophile approved."

The web interface for their live internet stream:
https://birach.com/wpon

Its direct stream link (for players like Winamp):
https://stream.zeno.fm/fvf0crpvub7tv

Whoever their engineer is, kudos to that person. I hope this inspires others to follow suit.
 
A key point you make was easy to miss, and I almost did. So in case anyone else misses this, here it is: THIS IS AN AM STATION! This would be superior sound for an FM, but to put this much effort into making an AM sound this good is astonishing. Unfortunately, very few listeners will ever notice the quality on their cheapo, poorly designed radios or tuners, no matter how much effort may have gone into cleaning up their audio chain and optimizing their transmitter and tower as much as possible. This is a class B, daytime power of 670 watts, nights at 580 watts, and shoots most of their juice north and away from Detroit. Shame. But these folks have created some superb source material to work with, and a delightfully crisp stream. Bravo!
 
Ironically they're owned by Birach, most of whose stations run programming from Overcomer Ministry (home to Brother Stair), whose audio quality is infamously bad.
 
This morning they played Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" (guess that is an oldie now), and it was truly mind blowing to hear it in 512 bitrate. And Wayne Newton's "Danke Shoen" was like hearing it for the first time. The last time I streamed WPON was late last year at their other website (wpon.com) which is still active but the listen live is now disabled. So this now through the Birach company website, which is interesting.

My question is why there aren't more high quality streams like this?
 
KilowattKat said:
My question is why there aren't more high quality streams like this?
Click to expand...
Bandwidth costs money, and more people will complain about a high-bitrate stream stuttering/dropping out because their connection can't keep up, than complain about the mediocre sound quality of a low-bitrate stream.
 
When KEXP started out you could connect to a full T-1 stream (1.544 Mbps). I do not recall the encoding method. I listened to it on a Sun workstation so that must have been ages ago.
 
amos1001 said:
and whoever the dj that's on wpon now... well, never mind. the stream is high quality.
Click to expand...
OMG I know! Is it a severe speech impediment, or is he a stroke victim? It makes me cringe trying to listen and figure out what he's saying. I'm sure he's paying for the time slot.
 
My online station have a internal FLAC full lossless stream, Makes my streaming server bandwidth cry for mercy. You can sound completely clean with 192kbps AAC-LC encoding, just leave dynamics for the encoder to work and WAVE/FLAC sources direct from CD
 
My private stream is 320k MP3, with 320k MP3 sources. I've tried AAC, but I find that it's somewhat less compatible.

As a rule, I don't generally like MP3, but with a good encoder at the maximum bitrate, I find it to be more than acceptable for what I'm using it for (Part 15 AM).

c
 
cc333 said:
My private stream is 320k MP3, with 320k MP3 sources. I've tried AAC, but I find that it's somewhat less compatible.

As a rule, I don't generally like MP3, but with a good encoder at the maximum bitrate, I find it to be more than acceptable for what I'm using it for (Part 15 AM).
Click to expand...
The gurus say you should never chain different codecs -- that you should encode your stream using the same lossy format your library uses, assuming your library contains lossy files. Separately, 320 MP3 is considered the equivalent of 256 AAC-LC, the Apple iTunes standard everyone seems fine with. So I'd say your streaming format and bitrate choices are the wisest you could've picked. :)
 
If you're looking for high quality audio on a radio station stream, there's none better than BBC Radio 3. Find yourself a quiet room, throw on some headphones and let the analyzing begin. WFMT and WCRB come in at 2nd place. Very little compression or limiting on any of these streams along with fantastic S/NR performance.
 
yeoldeschool said:
The gurus say you should never chain different codecs -- that you should encode your stream using the same lossy format your library uses, assuming your library contains lossy files. Separately, 320 MP3 is considered the equivalent of 256 AAC-LC, the Apple iTunes standard everyone seems fine with. So I'd say your streaming format and bitrate choices are the wisest you could've picked. :)
Click to expand...
That's excellent, because they seemed to me to me the choice with the widest compatibility (there's virtually no computer hardware or software made within the past 25-30 years that doesn't support MP3s in some way, although very early hardware and software might struggle with higher bitrates).

As proof, I've tested my stream to be fully capable of being received and heard on everything from a recent 9th gen Intel-based PC running Windows 7, 10 and 11 (via virtual machine) and MacOS 10.14 through 15 to an old PowerBook G3 running MacOS 9, a spread of just about 25 years. I haven't yet tried it on an old Pentium PC running Windows 95 or 98 (or even earlier; I think MP3 decoders existed for OSes as old as Windows 3.1), but I'm sure it would work fine with the proper configuration. If I try really hard, I'm sure I could even get my stream to work on a 286 running MS-DOS if I wanted to, though that's probably pushing it.

The only mandatory requirement is a functioning network connection with access to my streaming server, which everything I mentioned is more or less capable of.

c
 


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