I heard an old, familiar song on the radio this morning. But something about it was off, and I knew what. I found myself yelling at the radio, “Use a higher bitrate!” For you see, the chorus of the song exhibited something that sounded like the notorious “underwater” artifact in MP3 when encoding with too low a bitrate.
I remember first hearing perhaps 10 years ago that radio stations were starting to move all of their music to MP3 (prior to that, I remember hearing that some would have a stack of about 10 CD players with music queued up; who really knows? And I’m sure varying radio stations use different equipment and setups). I just assumed that a radio station would use the highest bitrate possible. Perhaps this particular encoding was a leftover from when the radio station first moved to MP3 (the song itself was from 1995), when they assigned an intern to use some shareware encoder that was only capable of 96 kbps MP3.
I know I can’t be the only multimedia geek who gets frustrated at seeing sub-optimality deployed in the world at large. I remember staying at a hotel during Christmas of 2000 (the same year I was just starting to study multimedia) where the in-hotel movie preview system through the TV displayed horrible blocking artifacts. At the time, I only vaguely understood what could have been going on.
UK Freeview (DVB-T) quality sucks too. Blocks everywhere.
Gha I know the feeling, Discovery Channel on Sky in Italy has similar problems :/
And yes, we’ve been spoiled by good compression ;)
Most HDTV I’ve seen on cable in my area looks worse than SDTV from the same carrier due to the compression artifacts.
You’ll probably find the HDTV is nothing but upscaled SD compressed at the same bitrate as SD channels.
On UK Freeview, the BBC channels are actually pretty good (for SD) most of the time. The worst quality I’ve seen was ITV2+1 (ITV2 delayed 1 hour).
Last fall, I was stuck in a long line at Radio Shack. I happened to be next to an HDTV which was tuned to ESPN. I ruined HDTV for about five random Radio Shack customers by training them in how to recognize compression artifacts. I didn’t mean to…I was simply explaining why I was disgusted with ESPN’s stream quality.
Another time, I was alone at Best Buy in the TV section (I was looking for an honest-to-God VCR with an analog tuner, but they’d pretty much stopped making them), and I saw this huge field of quickly-waving grass on their TVs. On a TV as wide as I am tall, the blocking artifacts were the size of my pinky, and I was a foot and a half away…
Being a A/V geek definitely has its downsides; as you expand your knowledge base and experience, your quality baseline also rises. In my case it means I hardly ever watch movies on friends’ setups, hardly listen to the radio, or up until a couple years ago simply couldn’t bear listening to commonplace MP3s (crappy xing-encoded 128Kb MP3s) and even now I can’t stand a prolonged exposure to cheap earphones (cheap earbuds are usually less offensive to my ears, curiously).
A blessing? A curse? I’m not sure. Yes, it means I notice quality loss a lot more often than the people around me, but I think I also enjoy really high quality content far more than they ever could. It all balances out, in the end.