What To Do About Sound Quality/Bandwidth Issues

[wesderby]

A lot of people have been saying, myself included, that sound quality has diminished since the addition of the three new channels Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, especially in the talk neighborhood. I'm also definitely noticing it in the music channels as well...In fact, the only place that doesn't seem to have lower quality sound is High Voltage. I don't know all of the technical aspects for allocating bandwidth or increasing it, but I do know that last year, right around Thanksgiving, the sound quality on the MLB, NHL, and college sports channels drastically improved, seemingly overnight...Not sure how they did that, but they need to do the same now with all their channels. At that time, I also noticed the actual volume of the channels became more consistent...On my radios, it used to be that Ethel, for whatever reason, was much louder than any other channel, and High Voltage and some of the other talker was WAY softer than the music channels.

This may be completely off-base, but here are some ideas I came up with that might help improve things...
1. Eliminate a channel such as Music Lab, and maybe add a few select programs from the channel to Deep Tracks or Fine Tuning.
2. Combine The Heart and The Blend into one channel.
3. Combine XM Cafe and The Loft into one channel...The music is pretty similar, or at least seems to me to be.

I'm sure none of these things are likely, but I'm guessing they'd help. Any other thoughts?

Also, somewhat unrelated, to me, The Village seems kind of out of place in the country neighborhood...I don't know; perhaps it should be moved to "Lifestyle" with HearMusic, Audiovisions and Fine Tuning. It's not a bad channel, just doesn't really fit well between Bluegrass Junction and Highway 16.

 

[gotrock]

suggestions...

Can't they merge:
1. Cinemagic (Movie Soundtracks) & On Broadway (Show Tunes)
2. and a couple of the Jazz, Latin, and Classical stations(respectively)?<P ID="signature">______________
want ROCK? get SQUIZZed!
</P>

 

[passtheword]

> A lot of people have been saying, myself included, that
> sound quality has diminished since the addition of the three
> new channels Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, especially in
> the talk neighborhood. I'm also definitely noticing it in
> the music channels as well...In fact, the only place that
> doesn't seem to have lower quality sound is High Voltage. I
> don't know all of the technical aspects for allocating
> bandwidth or increasing it, but I do know that last year,
> right around Thanksgiving, the sound quality on the MLB,
> NHL, and college sports channels drastically improved,
> seemingly overnight...Not sure how they did that, but they
> need to do the same now with all their channels. At that
> time, I also noticed the actual volume of the channels
> became more consistent...On my radios, it used to be that
> Ethel, for whatever reason, was much louder than any other
> channel, and High Voltage and some of the other talker was
> WAY softer than the music channels.
>
> This may be completely off-base, but here are some ideas I
> came up with that might help improve things...
> 1. Eliminate a channel such as Music Lab, and maybe add a
> few select programs from the channel to Deep Tracks or Fine
> Tuning.
> 2. Combine The Heart and The Blend into one channel.
> 3. Combine XM Cafe and The Loft into one channel...The music
> is pretty similar, or at least seems to me to be.
>
> I'm sure none of these things are likely, but I'm guessing
> they'd help. Any other thoughts?
>
> Also, somewhat unrelated, to me, The Village seems kind of
> out of place in the country neighborhood...I don't know;
> perhaps it should be moved to "Lifestyle" with HearMusic,
> Audiovisions and Fine Tuning. It's not a bad channel, just
> doesn't really fit well between Bluegrass Junction and
> Highway 16.


I'd rather not see The Heart and The Blend combined into one channel, personally. I know there's a lot of overlap on those two channels, but The Heart is more like the original soft AC sound that used to be on the air about 20 years ago, which hardly anyone offers on broadcast radio anymore. Although The Blend duplicates The Heart to some extent, The Blend has a lot of "harder-edge" AC thrown in.





*************************************************

Radio stations come and go.
Does anything last forever?
www.PassTheWord.net

 

[livingfruitvirus]

The music channels appear to be stabilizing again. Some are a bit scratchy, but the dynamics are returning to normal on the ones i listen to.

Really all they can do at this point is try to improve the technology. XM only has 12.5 Mhz of the airwaves to work with, which is a really crappy sanction (equivilant to 62.5 FM stations). Either they develop hierarchical modulation for their use, develop better audio compression techniques, or begin deleting channels. Personally, I think some talk channels like E! could use a drop.

Another problem XM has that Sirius doesn't is they give all their sports their own play-by-play channels, while Sirius simply pre-empts other channels for sports. It's good for saving bandwidth, but the talk show fans aren't happy about it.

 

[smashedcd]

Re: suggestions...

> Can't they merge:
> 1. Cinemagic (Movie Soundtracks) & On Broadway (Show Tunes)
> 2. and a couple of the Jazz, Latin, and Classical
> stations(respectively)?
>
i say combine 44 and 54..and 45 and 50..fred /lucy and the loft and xm cafe..drop E! that would help a lot! still better than fm radio!! even if some stations are distorted. at least the content is much better!! 1 month fm free for me!! i pretty much gave up on fm radio this year! i havent even been airchecking lately.<P ID="signature">______________
note to the NAB..satellite radio..its worth paying for!!</P>

 

[BRH]

Re: suggestions...

> Can't they merge:
> 1. Cinemagic (Movie Soundtracks) & On Broadway (Show Tunes)
> 2. and a couple of the Jazz, Latin, and Classical
> stations(respectively)?
>
No, don't merge Cinemagic and On Broadway. While there have certainly been movies that are musicals, all are certainly not, and there is a big difference in Broadway show tunes and music scores from mainstream movies. Personally, I don't care much about Cinemagic and the movie scores, but I love Broadway and musicals and I would not want the movie soundtracks mixed in on the Broadway channel.

 

[wesderby]

Yeah...I did notice a bit of improvement in the sound quality over the weekend...By last night, the channels all seemed back to almost normal sound quality.

Yeah, I've often wondered why XM doesn't just pre-empt other channels for the sports play-by-play...As it stands, those channels sit unused when their particular sport isn't in season, and for many hours of the day even when the sport IS in season. Might make sense to start bumping some other shows like Sirius...Then again, I imagine XM doesn't do that BECAUSE Sirius does and they've probably heard listener complaints about it.

But yeah, the E channel could go and I wouldn't be too upset. I also wouldn't mind seeing them dump XM Live since it's not used much anymore...Don't get me wrong; i miss the days when you could tune in anytime and hear some BBC archived concert or something from the performance theatres, but now, it seems like the channel's used maybe a few hours a week, and otherwise runs that obnoxious message letting you know the event scheduled has not yet started. It seems like they could either find more programming to put on the channel or could eliminate it and re-add it as needed like they did with 201 for Live 8 or 103 for that Me-103 promotion they ran last year.

> The music channels appear to be stabilizing again. Some are
> a bit scratchy, but the dynamics are returning to normal on
> the ones i listen to.
>
> Really all they can do at this point is try to improve the
> technology. XM only has 12.5 Mhz of the airwaves to work
> with, which is a really crappy sanction (equivilant to 62.5
> FM stations). Either they develop hierarchical modulation
> for their use, develop better audio compression techniques,
> or begin deleting channels. Personally, I think some talk
> channels like E! could use a drop.
>
> Another problem XM has that Sirius doesn't is they give all
> their sports their own play-by-play channels, while Sirius
> simply pre-empts other channels for sports. It's good for
> saving bandwidth, but the talk show fans aren't happy about
> it.
>

 

[wesderby]

> I'd rather not see The Heart and The Blend combined into one
> channel, personally. I know there's a lot of overlap on
> those two channels, but The Heart is more like the original
> soft AC sound that used to be on the air about 20 years ago,
> which hardly anyone offers on broadcast radio anymore.
> Although The Blend duplicates The Heart to some extent, The
> Blend has a lot of "harder-edge" AC thrown in.
>
Very good point...However, maybe some of the harder stuff could be moved to Mix, who already plays most of it, and the two channels could still be combined to make one traditional AC. However, if the sound quality continues to improve, then hopefully no channels will have to be eliminated.

 

[wesderby]

Re: suggestions...

Hmmm...I don't know how well that would work since the styles are different enough to where a merger would probably alienate a lot of listeners to the individual channels.

I still contend that Big Tracks being added doesn't make a lot of sense. I listened over the weekend and now that they're a separate channel, both they and Top Tracks have a LOT more repetition than Top Tracks ever used to. It just sort of seems like they split the Top Tracks library in half and gave half to Top Tracks and half to Big Tracks, with some over-lap. Don't get me wrong; musically, I like both channels, but I prefer them as one channel instead of two. Obviously, that's not the popular opinion; otherwise, XM would've left things as they were.

> Can't they merge:
> 1. Cinemagic (Movie Soundtracks) & On Broadway (Show Tunes)
> 2. and a couple of the Jazz, Latin, and Classical
> stations(respectively)?
>