"Del Cecchi" wrote in
:

And isn't that 44k Bytes per second?

Oh, sorry....44.1K 16-bit SAMPLES per second. Bytes are 8 bit. Here, a
little background reality:
http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_cdfaqb.html

Frequency response: 5 to 20,000 Hz +/- 3 dB.
Harmonic distortion: .008 % at 1 KHz.
Dynamic range: Greater than 90 dB.
Signal to noise ratio: Greater than 85 dB.

The frequency response is a dirty lie. That's the DISK frequency
response. If they want to SELL the music on FM radio, they use the RIAA
equalization standard of 50-15000 Hz....which is exactly the audio
bandwidth allowed on FM radio since World War 2 and what's been recorded
on all 33 RPM LPs since the first one was pressed. All the music you
listen to is recorded for FM transmission. Notice the freq response is
+/- 3%, not .3 or .03 or .00001. This means nothing because the worst
instrument in the listening string is YOU and your rotten human frequency
response. Drop by an audiologist and have your own hearing swept
frequency tested. It's just awful, even if you are 16 and never used
hiphop headphones so loud they could hear you in the next car.

Every FM stereo transmitter is sending out a constant "pilot tone" of 19
Khz, the whole time the transmitter is in stereo. This tone is the
reference frequency for the L minus R quadrature stereo difference
channel, a doublesideband supersonic audio signal centered on 38 Khz. To
inject the carrier for this subcarrier, the pilot tone is doubled to 38
Khz and injected so it can be detected in the stereo receiver without too
much interference to the main L + R main channel, compatible with mono FM
receivers. You don't hear the 19 Khz "tone" in the speakers because the
receiver has a sharp cutoff low pass filter at 15 Khz up. Sounds fine,
doesn't it?

Armed with this information, why would you buy a $5000 stereo receiver
that has a frequency response so wonderful it can reproduce 30 Khz to
drive the neighbor's ultrasonic-hearing dogs just crazy? You also don't
need a $1200 woofer that can reproduce 10-50 Hz, because the only thing
down there is turntable rumble and a few heavy trucks rattling FM
detector's tuned circuits, in older radios. Shhh...this farce has been
successfully sold the the public since WW2. It made many billionaires!

One more shot....radio stations playing the finest music used to run
massive reel to reel tape decks at 3 3/4" per second....while Audiofools
at home spent millions on 15"/sec massive monsters to steal it...(c; We
had 3 at our studio. Tape heads noted to be "muffled" were usually
cleaned with your pocket hanky...unless you'd blown your nose in it, when
toilet paper from the men's room was substituted. A few good rubs over
the head to get the layer of tape crap off 'em fixed the freq response
problem for another couple of weeks. "Alignment" meant you put in a
commercially recorded tape, plugged in your headphones, punched play and
waited for the music to come up....then turned the head alignment screw
until Elvis had the most highs you could hear. Close enough. The boss
would bitch if you wanted to buy an "alignment tape standard", a waste of
money. If you made it sound TOO good, the advertisers would **** and
moan that their commercials sounded like crap on the cart machines at 1
3/4 ips....the only reason the transmitter was on the air in the first
place. In America, programming just fills in the time between
commercials....now even on Educational Radio and TV!

Lucky for us BBC has internet streaming....Thank you Radio 2!

Remember those old CRT television sets? All of them screamed at
15,565Hz, the horizontal Color scan rate. Could you hear them screaming
while you were watching Ed Sullivan? When I was a teen, I could hear
them, especially my grandfather's Dumont monochrome monster. After
sleeping with the whine of axial vent fans in the Navy, that cured that
problem for the rest of my life, even before the electronic scanning came
out.

Larry
--
I worked hard under Social Security since I was 12.
My SS retirement check is one American Eagle/month!
Can we afford to start any more wars for corporations?