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CBS-FM Audio: Getting Worse, Not Better

It's a big shame how it sounds at the moment. It sound exactly the same as there livestream on internet! Flat, dry and soulless. ??? It sounds like the processor is broken or in bypass mode.
 
dumber than a box of hair said:
Let's keep this in perspective. The hot music medium of the moment is bit-rate-compressed MP3s recorded at low sampling rates and listened to through microscopic ear buds...about as far from the "hi-fi" of 50 years ago as you can get.
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I consider myself one of the last of a dying breed of audiophile. I see kids everyday listening to iPods or cell phone mp3 players and I swear they wouldn't know high fidelity audio if it bit them on the backside and introduced themselves. And this is the generation they're trying to introduce HD Radio to?

dumber than a box of hair said:
I too hate CBS-FM's audio, but these days there's little or no incentive to improve it because the audience's ears have been so badly dumbed down.
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This is really sad, especially since I can listen to stations operated by Cox, Cumulus and Clear Channel and they actually "get it" as far as very good audio processing AND fidelity.
 
What a shame...

I remember being in NYC a few years ago and being blown away by the CBS-FM processing. What a truly amazing sound it was!

For those of use not in NYC, it would be great if somebody could upload some examples of how it sounds now?
 
While CBS-FM's audio continues to sound like garbage, I also noticed that 92.3's audio sounds very similar. Muddy, flat and lacking in dynamic range when compared with Z-100 and KTU (which has some fantastic audio processing).

I wonder if this is a cluster engineer putting his "stamp" on the stations?

Clear Channel's FMs sound quite good, with the exception of WLTW. CBS's FMs sound quite horrible, aside from Fresh 102.7, which sounds about right for its format.
 
LenoxAve said:
While CBS-FM's audio continues to sound like garbage, I also noticed that 92.3's audio sounds very similar. Muddy, flat and lacking in dynamic range when compared with Z-100 and KTU (which has some fantastic audio processing).

I wonder if this is a cluster engineer putting his "stamp" on the stations?

Clear Channel's FMs sound quite good, with the exception of WLTW. CBS's FMs sound quite horrible, aside from Fresh 102.7, which sounds about right for its format.
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I often wondered what the deal has been this year with so many NYC stations having bad audio on and off. So this is completely wild speculation on my part out of ignorance and not based on anything. The question that came to my mind is I thought they all shared the same antenna at the Empire State building so was thinking maybe they all share the same engineering team that deals with incoming audio links to various transmitters(s).

Probably just coincidental but it seemed like one station would be a mess, get better then another would have the same problem. Kind of like they could not fix a problem there and each station had to take a turn using the bad audio link for a few weeks or a month.
 
Each station has their own links. T1 lines, digital STL, composite STL. If a station is on the backup composite STL it won't sound as good as on the main STL's. Some stations even had the STL receive antenna in the window at Empire! I think it was WQXR when they were owned by the NY Times.

Each station and/or group also has their own engineers.
 
WNTIRadio said:
Each station has their own links. T1 lines, digital STL, composite STL. If a station is on the backup composite STL it won't sound as good as on the main STL's. Some stations even had the STL receive antenna in the window at Empire! I think it was WQXR when they were owned by the NY Times.

Each station and/or group also has their own engineers.
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And in most cases -- While they share a common antenna and some plumbing to get their output to that antenna -- Their transmitters are in their own cages / rooms and other groups don't have access to each others transmitters.
 
Is there any body up there "watching". Or is the redundancy good enough that there is only maintenance or repair visits? I assume they use composite STL's to cut down on the equipment at the ESB.
 
Most of the STL's are digital. Remember, they're sending the main channel audio as well as the HD-1,2 and 3 payloads up there. Composite STL doesn't cut it on that regard, and a digital discrete L/R STL is always going to sound better. You get better modulation control with the processor due to the lack of STL "bounce"... which is in a composite STL is where you can have a 100% peak that shows up on the receive end as 97% one time, 99% another, 103% another and so on. You can use a composite clipper to catch the overshoots, but then you're degrading your sound and increasing your chance for more multipath.

The engineers visit the ESB a lot. With that much money on the line, multiple layers of redundancy are a MUST.
 
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