This one's a late night, in-the-kitchen thought. I turned the radio on while I was making a cup of tea and of course, after R4 closedown the WS is simulcast. On FM, you get a wonderful, crisp stereo feed. On DAB, the WS feed is fine when listening to the Radio 4 simulcast, 128kbps stereo, but its own dedicated slot is naff: a 64kbps mono stream. On the web, it's even worse - only streamed at 32kbps WMA/RA. AsianNetwork is 64kbps mono on DAB - even 5Live has a better bitrate (80kbps mono).
While I'm not a big Asian Network listener, I do live in Brum so take a bit of an interest in Asian community goings on. However, I'd quite like to listen to the WS during the daytime, either via the web or via DAB - how come the bitrates haven't been upped for these stations on the web streams? They're dragging behind the other BBC radio stations' online streams. Are there any plans to ever up the bandwidth of these neglected stations, either on DAB, on the web or both? I'm under the impression that the maximum bitrate for the multiplex is 1184kbps useable. According to DigitalRadioTech [1], the pre2002 bitrates were significantly higher (which I remember), and I can understand the reasons for lowering the bitrates to fit in the newer channels. The web's a different matter entirely though. What's stopping the Beeb from upping the bitrates for all the online streams to the same bitrate? (and will the bitrates ever go above 128kbps? I'd love a 192kbps or 256kbps stream, particularly for... Well, all of the radio stations!) And also, as a final question - how come the iPlayer pages for *all* of the radio stations are currently reporting each one as being currently off-air? Have the boxes doing the encoding and streaming been taken offline for work overnight or something? If someone aboard the HMS Sceptre is browsing the Radio 4 iPlayer site and sees that it's currently offair, they might think Britain is under attack and launch some Tridents at the Soviets. Wouldn't *that* be an interesting one for Gordon Brown to try and explain! - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
