From what I know, every advertisement I do, goes out MPeg to the address that the station provides me for programming uploads and I do believe that Hard drive Mpeg has a huge foothold in recorded broadcast worldwide. All but gone are CD players, turntables and open reel systems in favor of the superiour reliability of the hard drive. Clear channel is huge. Ck this site. Anyone out there that has daily experience with the broadcast medium..please chime in and tell us what it is like out there today.Clear Channel
It's almost all hard drives running fairly high bitrate MPEG 1s for music and MP3s for commercials. Television is doing the same thing, large arrays of drives. The grossest part is that one person may be running four stations at once.
Here we run Dalet with MPEG layer II compression for our playout system. I'd love to be able to send and recieve MP3 commercials. Unfortunately, the people involved in production and the radio industry as a whole are in the dark ages over here. I seem to be the only person with this capability.
The thing that frustrates me is that most of the broadcast systems are dedicated hardware. The signal goes through a number of a to d/d to a conversions and lossy coding/decoding steps before ever going on the air. It's being done entirely for the purpose of reducing the need for skilled broadcast personnel with no regard for the subjective results. This is a sonic disaster for highly peak-limited music. It results in lower average levels on the air and a level of distortion that theoretically should cause listeners to change stations more frequently. People logically should be far less inclined to buy the music they hear on the radio. While it would cost a fortune to prove this scientifically, it can't be helping the proliferation of "turntable hits" I mentioned in another thread.
Originally posted by Bob Olhsson: It's almost all hard drives running fairly high bitrate MPEG 1s for music and MP3s for commercials. Television is doing the same thing, large arrays of drives. The grossest part is that one person may be running four stations at once. Indeed - I was just delivering some mixes and a :30 spot for a charity Christmas CD I've produced to the local radio "complex", which is 2 AM and 2 FM stations running from one server. I was asked to deliver the music as 32kHz .wav, and the commercial as 128kbs .mp3. The television stations I deal with demand broadcast quality video and 48kHz 16 bit audio.
