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<blockquote data-quote="John Roberts" data-source="post: 92690" data-attributes="member: 126">Re: Audio Files - best qualityExactly...&nbsp; Radio stations have long been in a competition to &quot;sound&quot; louder than each other so they pop when listeners scan the dial to pick a station. If anything I would hope this trend is subsiding as product is already highly compressed, making it harder to hear a difference. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :-)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />They are not trying to appeal to audio connoisseurs but the general public who are not very discerning about dynamic range. Wide dynamic range is not very useful when listening to radio inside a car at highway speed (my car at least). The CD player in my car even has a &quot;compress&quot; button so I can listen to CDs with some chance of hearing the quiet parts (pianissimo). The radio doesn&#039;t have a compress button for obvious reasons. IIRC decades ago DBX made a consumer expander to undo some of the broadcast processing but the fact that this is not a current product category suggests the market demand for that was weak. The consumers ultimately get what most of them want, not what a few of them want. Even if we are more right than the customers who are ALWAYS right.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :-)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />JRPS: FWIW back in the day when cassettes were popular, lots of consumers would playback NR encoded dolby B tapes, without decoding because they liked the extra compression.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="John Roberts, post: 92690, member: 126"] Re: Audio Files - best quality Exactly... Radio stations have long been in a competition to "sound" louder than each other so they pop when listeners scan the dial to pick a station. If anything I would hope this trend is subsiding as product is already highly compressed, making it harder to hear a difference. :-) They are not trying to appeal to audio connoisseurs but the general public who are not very discerning about dynamic range. Wide dynamic range is not very useful when listening to radio inside a car at highway speed (my car at least). The CD player in my car even has a "compress" button so I can listen to CDs with some chance of hearing the quiet parts (pianissimo). The radio doesn't have a compress button for obvious reasons. IIRC decades ago DBX made a consumer expander to undo some of the broadcast processing but the fact that this is not a current product category suggests the market demand for that was weak. The consumers ultimately get what most of them want, not what a few of them want. Even if we are more right than the customers who are ALWAYS right. :-) JR PS: FWIW back in the day when cassettes were popular, lots of consumers would playback NR encoded dolby B tapes, without decoding because they liked the extra compression. [/QUOTE]

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