iTunes audio streaming quality

[Dave2002]

Today I thought I'd listen to R3 (and R4) via streaming using iTunes. I was surprised at how poor the sound quality was, even in (allegedly) HD mode. There is a fairly obvious ringing sound which is signal related, while speech has a surround of noise.

I also sampled the same channels using via the Chrome browser - which still shows up some faults, though the ringing sound does seem to be missing.

I wonder why iTunes is not able to decode the BBC streaming channels without the ringing effect.

None of the playback methods I tried gave very good results.

[richardfinegold]

That is interesting. When I listen to Radio 3 on Apple TV, it sounds terrible, even in the "high" setting. If I listen using my Squeezebox or my Marantz streamer, it sounds much better.

[Stunsworth]

Today I thought I'd listen to R3 (and R4) via streaming using iTunes. I was surprised at how poor the sound quality was, even in (allegedly) HD mode. There is a fairly obvious ringing sound which is signal related, while speech has a surround of noise

I noticed the same the other week, I thought it was just me.

I've no idea why it affects iTunes, but I've started listening to R3 via the HD feed on the R3 webpage and that sounds fine.

[OldTechie]

This strange fault is present on a PC as well (I think the other posts are from MAC users.) On my PC it is usually a disaster the first time I start Radio 3 HD in iTunes - with very high level noise through which there is a trace of the actual transmission. Restarting Radio 3 within the iTunes session makes it a bit better, and after half a dozen restarts it is pretty well OK. The effect seems to be worse if I set the iTunes output to "Direct Sound" rather than "Windows Audio Session", but this may just be confusion in various restarts of iTunes. Sometimes after restarting, iTunes produces no sound at all on Radio 3 HD on first playing despite downloading the data over the network. I normally use foobar2000 to play exactly the same feed that iTunes uses - and that has no such problems.

[Dave2002]

That is interesting. When I listen to Radio 3 on Apple TV, it sounds terrible, even in the "high" setting. If I listen using my Squeezebox or my Marantz streamer, it sounds much better.

I'll try to replicate that sometime during the week. Bit of a shame, and rather poor if Apple can't get these things right. They have had problems with iTunes before, which eventually they fixed (e.g. for CD ripping), but seems that they may not have figured out how to do radio streaming properly yet.

[OldTechie]

The version of iTunes that suffered from the problem on my machine was 12.0.1.25 By reverting to version 11.1.5.5 (the most recent of the versions I happened to have available) I could fix it - so it seems to be an iTunes 12 issue. But I need iTunes 12 to work with the current iPad software. Good job I don't need it for music.