Distorted audio with one 128kbps station

[shurik]

Hi,

I have left last week a message to support but did not get any answer yet. To make long story short the station Echo of Moscow is by default 24kbps which is impossible to listen. I have found an mp3 stream of the same radio with 128kbps http://w02-sw01.akadostream.ru:8000/moscowecho128.mp3 I plays well with SqueezePlay but on Radio the volume is very low and the sound is distorted. 7.5.1 as well as the beta 7.6
Does anyone have an idea how to correct this?
Thanks

PS posting on bugtracker as well

[shurik]

Got the first answer from Logitech support... Plot thickens… They really take people for idiots, I believe. They wrote that PC has a priority in streaming from the radio station. They suggested that the result will vary during the day depending on the network congestion.

They do not understand that this is so easy to disprove. Downloaded a chunk of mp3 stream with Hidownload and surprisingly the same problem exists with the stream played from the local hard drive.

Keep you posted on further developments

Are there any Sonos fans hanging around to test the stream? Would be very much grateful.

[andyg]

Interesting, if you listen on Radio via the speaker it sounds terrible. If you plug in headphones the sound is fine. I wonder if there is something going on in the DSP conversion from stereo -> mono that doesn't work well with this station.

[wayneBR]

Interesting, if you listen on Radio via the speaker it sounds terrible. If you plug in headphones the sound is fine. I wonder if there is something going on in the DSP conversion from stereo -> mono that doesn't work well with this station.

Thanks for the headphone tip. I've found a couple of stations with the same problem. One of them (KLRZ) use to be listed on RadioTime, and now, they deleted the station. Good thing I saved the fav on my radio. Now I know how to listen to the station on the sb radio.

[andyg]

It's probably a combination of the way our DSP mixes stereo to mono and the audio from the station. If both channels cancel each other out, or mostly cancel each other out, this will happen. It could be an encoding problem or some other problem at the station's side.

[shurik]

Thanks for looking into this. That makes sense. Just by hearing the sound I could guess it was kind of decoding/processing issue. But when I got the typical support answer pointing third party as culprit it was kindof insulting my intelligence. Thus, I pointed how wrong the answer was. Now I got the answer that basically if I think I am so smart I should be able to fix it myself: "Vous racontant des conneries comme vous le dîtes, je suppose que vous êtes plus qualifié que moi et que vous réussirez à résoudre votre problème tout seul."

Overall, while I have tried to order last week the Transporter (the system cancelled the order and now they are out of stock) and was contemplating the addition of another radio and controller, I think if the support continue so I have to investigate ways to return the Radio instead...

[shurik]

I have tried to restream through VLC by downsampling to mono. Interestingly, VLC scrampbles down the audio the same way.

[Mnyb]

Worst case it could actually be some kind of "wide stereo" effect added by the station, some phase effect ?

In the old days sound engineers actually checked (booth live and on records) if the sound was "mono compatible" if it sounded reasonable ok in mono to.

Meh nowadays one should probably be surprised if any sound engineer is involved at all .

Some open source software and you have a radio station .

[shurik]

Just as a proof of principle: MPC-HC allows to remap one of channels to 2 output channels. Use virtual audio device as output. Create a stream from it using VLC. It works but it is neither practical nor reliable.