Hi,
I'm not sure how many people here who listen to what was Galaxy radio and is now Capital. When the switchover occured, I naturally tuned in to what only could be described as utter destruction. Now, to get technical, the radio show is obviously produced in a studio and then the audio is pumped through various equipment of which one is a broadcast compressor. This basically smooths out the audio and boosts the lows and sometimes clips the highs of the music. Different stations use different equipment and the 'sound' of galaxy was pretty good, it was punchy, loud and clear.
However, when capital took over, they have quite obviously swapped out some equipment including the compressors. Now this is fine but it would maybe help if the engineers sat down and programmed it instead of what sounds like getting it out of the box, plugging it in and leaving it. It has left the overall sound of the station quite poor and not inkeeping with the music it plays. i.e younger music such as dance, rnb and pop should be loud and punchy, but instead, its like listening to smooth radio..
Galaxy sadly is gone but it had its day and in its early days, it was quite possibly the first station to have had national shows with independant regional adverts broadcast from each regional station. it was a horrendously complicated affair according to one of the galaxy engineers i was talking to. it used 8 channel isdn lines from station to station and it was all timed to the second, almost as good as the bbc used to be in the old days with the atomic clock beeps, to which they still use on some shows on radio 1. The beeb have two atomic clocks located in the basement of yalding house i believe.
I'm a bit of a music tech head and this has been getting on my nerves for a while now to the point i don't listen to it anymore as they have not only ruined the sound but also destroyed the weekend lineup.
The bbc by far has the best studios and station sound. They employ the best of the best engineers and when you listen to the likes of radio 1 and 1xtra, it has the perfect sound. Have a listen to it compared to other none bbc stations next time your sat in the car bored.
What is quite interesting is that despite the beeb having the best of the best at a cost of millions, the actual music quality on DAB is only that of a 320kbs MP3 at best and worse on fm. This obviously worsens the smaller the radio station is, i.e regional. This is because there simply isnt the bandwidth to transmit better quality sound, although it would be hard to tell the difference these days with the high quality of the encoders used for audio at the bbc. It is also very expensive for the best hardware.
Anyway, rant over.
Dan the Geek
