Sampling frequency on Radio programmes

[Jim web]

In article <55339C51.9040203 at soulman1949.com>,
   Alan Milewczyk <alan at soulman1949.com> wrote:
> > The endgame should be that we can now all get better quality 48k.
> I would have thought that the difference in audio quality between 44k1 
> and 48k would be marginal, if at all discernible to the human ear.

Yes. The difference is generally likely to be somewhere between slight and
undetectable *if the conversion is done well*. However from the POV of the
audiophile engineer *any* conversion can be expected to degrade the results
by losing some info. Just a question of degree. So best to avoid them if
you can.

That said, I was happy enough with the 48k -> 44.1k conversion done
previously by the BBC. (And I did get a chance to compare with source files
around the time Coyopa was launched.)

So the real concern is when a conversion like this might be done 'poorly'.
[1]

Hence the choice by the Coyopa team to have their system do a good quality
conversion rather than leave it to the tender mercy of Flash. Particularly
given that even the BBC team can't look at the details because they can't
see the source code used by Flash itself. They *did* try to fix this by
working on their plugin, but no joy. The problem was in the Flash system as
released... and which hasn't been updated for Linux. :-/

Jim

[1] For some examples of how digital 'improvements' can muck up audio, have
a look at http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/HFN/HealthCheck/CD.html OK, this is
from Audio CDs but it shows what can go on.

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