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KYSR/Alt 98.7 Audio Quality

S

SuperH

The sibilance on this station is horrible, there is hardly any bass response, you can hear the multiband compression, and composite clipping. On HD Radio (HD1), it is especially noticeable. What is going on with this station? I otherwise love the content, but I can only listen for prolonged periods of time when there isn't a lot of music playing, like with "The Woody Show". I bet if someone just looked at the audio processor, they would see that something is not right immediately. The output level isn't even that high. Is this station's engineering operation on autopilot? I have a friend who is high up on the ladder at iHeartMedia who I reached out to about this, but Los Angeles isn't one of his markets (nor does he want to touch it with a "ten foot pole" (his words, not mine)).

The station is tolerable with the analog broadcast. The problem is, many of my tuners I cannot disable the IBOC function on. Things like these were not issues in Terry Grieger's days.

I have emailed every contact I could find who may be able to send this to the right direction, but it seems to always go into vapor.

Does this drive anyone else nuts? Even on the whole, CBS Radio's cluster here sounds significantly cleaner. I know KBIG with iHeartMedia runs Omnia.11, and the CBS Radio cluster here is universally Orban 8600 HDs. Is Alt 98.7 given the same processor treatment? If so, count me unimpressed.
 
I've emailed them. I want to get hold of an engineer. I am convinced they aren't monitoring the audio quality of the HD-1. It can sound OK with some content, but as soon as the density increases, the intermodulation distortion becomes very apparent. Analog is tolerable.

Also, I can hear the density control algorithm; it's bad. Take Self Esteem/The Offspring:
La la... la la la, la la... la la la (4 measures)... guitars/ensemble (12 measures)... guitar/drum duo (8 measures)... by the 3rd measure of the duo, the audio level comes up quickly... Then, some lyrics followed by: "I know she's playing with me... That's okay 'cause I got no self esteem"... SQUISH (all of the instruments become a jumbled mess).

Same thing happens: "But I really think it's better this way
The more you suffer
The more it shows you really care
Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah..." (Un-squishes), audio level rises considerably (and audibly)...

"Now I'll relate this little bit
That happens more than I'd like to admit..."

The peak-to-average ratio sounds fairly consistent, but when the hypercompressed content comes in, the audio level actually drops, to the point where if you were scanning along the dial for this station, it would actually not stand out at all. It sounds like perceptual loudness is not maintained - arithmetic loudness is. Not to mention, the sibilance which is caused from the processing itself. Between intermodulation distortion, and sibilance, this station is difficult to listen to in HD for prolonged periods of time.

And yes, it impacts the web stream too. It definitely doesn't sound like a 64kbps IBOC HDC HD Radio broadcast. Not many of the iHeartMedia stations in this market sound that great in HD. I think MyFM 104.3 is probably the best sounding one, and that could be content related. The CBS cluster (all of them) sound pristine for what they are, here.
 
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