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Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, almost all cases where you're listening to FM radio, you're listening on a crappy device.

I remember having Sirius in two of my previous vehicles and not noticing it being that poor of sound quality from low digital compression rates, compared to CD's or what I'd get from my iTunes on my phone. However, in my current vehicle which has a pretty solid factory system, the digital artifacts are exceptionally glaring.

When you're on a bad system, some of the compression or limiting happening to the track is either a positive or not noticeable.

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Have heard some arguments that the UK's (world's?) digital protocol, DAB is actually a worse experience for listeners than a decent FM station, but I'm not all that well informed on that.

Quick clarification on digital versus the kind of compression discussed in the article: with the former you're making the file size smaller and losing a little bit of quality in the process (sometimes leaving artifacts), whereas with the latter you are seeking to make the loud bits quieter, meaning you can make the whole lot louder without distortion.

Another thing worth noting is that for the vast majority of users, the car will be the best listening environment they are exposed to. When I had a very minor foray into the recording world, I remember the mix engineers trying out bouncedowns around the car park.

In my opinion, with Sirius when the digital compression is noticeable, it's a worse listening experience than normal FM analog compression and fidelity, so I'd imagine that's true for other over-the-air digital compression.

I was surprised to find that out myself. I bought a used car a year ago with satellite radio hardware, but it didn't come with a subscription. Shortly after I got it, Sirius did a promotion where it was free for anyone with a receiver for a few days. I couldn't believe how bad it sounded: substantially worse than FM, and actively fatiguing and unpleasant to listen to. Despite the range of decent stations offered (and my hatred of commercials) it was bad enough to put me off signing up.

Interestingly, I thought the always-free "Preview" station was of noticeably higher quality.

That's mostly wrong. DAB uses 128kbps or 192kbps MPEG2 audio, which is pretty similar to MP3 at those bitrates; either is way better than FM radio, except for material that breaks the algorithm (noise, applause of some sorts).

...and cymbals? That's always my go-to tell.

Cymbals also tend to suffer very quickly with strong dynamics compression. The most recent Prodigy album The Day is my Enemy has a lot of that, unfortunately. I much prefer their 2nd, Music for the Jilted Generation :)

I'm not sure which of the parent posters started but it seems like we're conflating two rather unrelated meanings of the word "compression" here: compression in the sense of data-compression (which is often lossy for many audio formats like mp3) and compression in the sense of dynamics-compression, which is what is meant by "compression" in the context of mastering.

Most of the music channels at Sirius (when i was in a position to have knowledge) were being broadcast at 32 kb/s. I wouldn't call myself a hard core audiophile, but that quality is below the threshold of what I enjoy listening to.

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