Auntie Beeb takes a dive ...

PaulBrewer

http://recordproduction.com/blog/2009/12/the-rise-and-fall-of-audio-quality-at-the-bbc/

A very interesting article about the 'demise' of the BBCs recording quality.
Their music archive has to be the best in the world - pity to see it brought into question.

Thanks to Mike Banks of Record Production for the link.

jtsuited

PaulBrewer wrote: »

http://recordproduction.com/blog/2009/12/the-rise-and-fall-of-audio-quality-at-the-bbc/

A very interesting article about the 'demise' of the BBCs recording quality.
Their music archive has to be the best in the world - pity to see it brought into question.

Thanks to Mike Banks of Record Production for the link.

been hearing complaints like this the last while. the real problem (in my limited experience of course) is the moving of stuff around.

certain people (mainly in management) give deadlines that no longer allow for the proper sending of cd's, dat's etc. and so at the last minute you're trying to upload stuff to servers and you end up having to use something else other than FLAC to compress the file.

Also the past few years has seen the rise of 'focus groups' in broadcasting.

they take 100 normal people who don't listen to music, stick them in a room, play them a 24 bit wav beside a 128 mp3, come to the conclusion that the difference isn't enough to justify the extra cost and save money at the expense of audio quality.

it's going on in a lot of areas of broadcasting and needless to say engineers are giving up trying to argue with clueless management who get their info from 'marketing' halfwits.

I'm maybe slightly surprised the beeb are letting things slip but honestly you can't underestimate how stupid broadcast management can be when it comes to these things.

Quiggers

their standards have dropped with regard to hiring the talent too,
20 years ago if you didn't speak the queens english, ie perfect diction, then you couldn't get on air,
now jonathan woss, a bunch of mumblers on the one show, the london gangsta drawl on the cross show.

I dont think file formats are that big a problem for them, broadband in the uk trounces what we get here in ireland, the beeb will have a dedicated line at each site, not a twisted pair like over here, not even a co-axial, but a dedicated fibre optic or light pipe as its now called.

Sub contracting is a problem tho, everything is made to a price these days, not to a standard.

godfrey

Quiggers wrote: »

the beeb will have a dedicated line at each site, not a twisted pair like over here, not even a co-axial, but a dedicated fibre optic or light pipe as its now called.

Sub contracting is a problem tho, everything is made to a price these days, not to a standard.

I'm assuming you mean on OB's (outside broadcasts). if not, then I'm not sure what you're referring to. contribution studio links in UK and Ireland (RTE) are mostly linear 48K/24bit digital audio on fibre.

as for OB's, ISDN is the standard, using Mpeg layer ll, 128Kbps joint stereo on 2 'B' groups. this yields 15KHz bandwidth and while it is not a new standard, it's a robust format and holds up to cascading, which is a vital attribute in broadcast, because of the encoding and decoding processes further down the line. interestingly, RTE Radio satellite uplinks use APT-X 256K coding for even better fidelity. APT-X is an algorithym developed by a company in Belfast.

an exception to this is news and commentary which is voice only, which is usually a G.722 codec over 1 ISDN 'B' group, yielding a 7Khz bandwidth. it's coarse sounding, but it's advantage is extremely low coding delay, important in live discussion/news and sport programmes.

any/all sub contractors (RTE Radio currently is not using contractors in Radio OB's) are subject to the same audio transport standards as in-house engineers & operators, in order to be compatible with the host equipment.

of course, how they mix is another story completely, as discussed in the article.

hope this helps ~

g