Internet listening - How was it for you?

[Gordon]

A little survey

For those of you that have listened to Proms this season using the internet how did you get on?

Was the service reliable and free from spurious glitches, dropouts, clicks etc?
Was it good enough to enjoy the music without the technology getting in the way?

I know the stream will be HD so I'm not interested in the sound quality per se only in the continuity of the service. I know some of you prefer the quality that the HD stream offers.

Why did you choose to listen via internet?
Was it because of bad local FM and/or DAB reception where you are?
Was it more convenient?
Were you not at home and listened on the move?
Would you use the internet more if you had a better service eg speed?

If you have good FM why use internet?
If and when it goes away what will you do then?

One reason why I am asking is that, although my internet speed is good and mostly reliable, it does hiccup a fair amount, mostly buffering, suggesting congestion, and I cannot really rely on it to listen to concerts using IPlayer. My experience with Proms has been poor. It is lot worse trying to watch TV again suggesting speed issues but I can get way over 6 MBit/s on a test download. There are no power users on the router either!! The desktop [XP] and laptop [W7] give much the same experience and each has plenty of memory [no other apps running when listening] and equivalent 3GHz clocks. I have not tried taking the laptop elsewhere yet.

[johnb]

I've used the iPlayer feed for all the Proms I've listened to and it has been rock solid. However, I use a Squeezebox Touch (with a 3rd party plugin) to feed iPlayer to my audio system and I believe that (like iTunes) takes the iPlayer stream from a different server to that used by iPlayer on a PC. All my listening has been at home.

As I use a Squeezebox Touch, selecting iPlayer is no different to choosing FM or DAB on my audio system, so the technology is transparent. As the choice is so simple it makes sense to select iPlayer, not least because I'm allergic to FM's dynamic range compression (at least as far as orchestral music is concerned).

My connection usually gives me actual download speeds of ~7Mbps (measured by the DU Meter utility). Sometimes it is less than that but 7Mbps is the norm.

This has probably no relevance to your problem but I have read that some consumer grade routers over heat and have problems with sustained high bandwidth (not sure if that is the right term), e.g. streaming PCM or movies.

[OldTechie]

I always use an internet feed (well unless I actually want to reboot the PC when I switch to Virgin Media).

Broadcast
FM: Lost dynamic range + hum inserted at the Guildford relay transmitter at a level I don't like.

Freeview: 192kbps. Only source is a Samsung TV that randomly comes up with left and right swapped on its digital output. No hum, full dynamic range (when not zapped at the RAH). Rock solid stream once I have restarted the TV until it comes up with left and right correct.

Virgin Media: Sounds identical to Freeview in quality to me and I don't need the TV on. However, a minor glitch about every 10 to 15 minutes. I think they multiplex all the radio channels together, probably using TV frame based locking and it slips because Capital radio/Clsaaic FM/BBC/Kiss FM etc are not all locked to the same reference. All radio channels do it and it sounds like the brief hiccup I have heard on professional video gear when a synchroniser slips an AES frame to get some unlocked audio back in sync with the video with some minor processing to avoid an enormous click.

Akamai CDN
BBC>iPlayer>Radio>Radio3>Listen Live: Plays an Akamai stream that has 48kbps, 192kbps and 320kbps versions. There is a bug in the BBC SWF file (EMP v3.0.0.r617463_61825_4) and it always selects the 192 kbps feed (which claims to be a 128 kbps feed if your right click on it - but it is really 192 kbps.) To me this feed is slightly inferior to the Freeview/VM feed. I think that although the aac compression is probably better, there are two other digital degradations in the path.. the BBC has downconverted from 48KHz to 44.1KHz, and I have no way to get the feed to my DAC without passing through the Windows 7 mixer (which is, actually, very good unlike the XP one which is dreadful.)

BBC>Radio>Radio 3>Listen or click on the pop-out player button on the previous option: You get the BBC Radio Player. This uses exactly the same Akamai stream set as the iPlayer version about but a different SWF file (EMP v3.1.0.r674606_674817). This player correctly selects the 320kbps stream which sounds significantly better to me.

The BBC iPlayer Desktop application also plays the three-data-rate Akamai stream. It correctly selects the 320 kbps stream and is probably more reliable than using a browser.

Original Test Setup:
There is another Akamai stream set that contains only the 320 kbps feed. This is the original experimental setup. You can get it by clicking on the Live HD steam link on the main page of the forum, but lnks to it have pretty well disappeared from the BBC web site.

One serious cause of failure with these internet feeds was, I found, that I would accidentally close the browser and they would stop completely. But I found variable reliability with temporary stoppages. I thought this was that the browsers were not giving the Flash player enough processing time so i built my own player so that the Flash code was not running in a browser. That helped a bit but I could see that the BBC's code was doing all sorts of tricks to try to keep the stream going.

Limelight CDN
There is another stream distributed by Limelight. This does not use the Adobe/Flash rights protection scheme and is thus less secure. As a result, it sometimes prevents trnasmission of Radio 3 and you get a loop saying that for copyright reasons this programme is not available. That happened to some of the live Met performances earlier this year.

I find this stream to be more reliable. It is the one that iTunes plays.

I play it using foobar2000. I set foobar2000 as the default player for .pls files. I have a shortcut to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/listen/live/r3_aaclca.pls and when I click on it I choose the option in the browser to open it. foobar2000 allows me to bypass the Windows mixer and it takes full control of the DAC interface - which is USB.

It is not perfect. I think the USB interface as driven by foobar stays locked to a reference provided by the DAC.

If I use the windows mixer, I think that then locks to the DAC, but it must provide processing to handle asychronous sources in order to function. My DAC manufacturer says it is all pretty good and just to set the interface to 24/96 and let Windows sort it out. I think it sounds better if I don't do that.

So in my setup foobar2000 is able to receive 44.1KHz samples no faster than the rate the BBC sends them and must deliver them to my DAC at the rate it asks for them. On start up there is a chance that it will run out of samples to send to the DAC. It will then pause and wait until it is sufficienlty behind that it can play for a decent time with the rate difference - so it may now be 15 seconds behind live. Once it has done that it will normall be OK for at least 4 hours. Of course if my DAC and the BBC disagree about 44.1KHz in the other direction it can just get further and further behind (and the CDN stores a large quantity of data that foobar can ask for later.)

If I leave this going for too long (24 hours or so) it may fail. This is because the playlist contains a security code which is changed every 24 hours, so it need restarting. I think iTunes might handle this in the background for you.

With this I can do lots of things on the computer with no interruption to the feed, but when using Flash it was defintely intermittent.

[jayne lee wilson]

I'm not allergic to the dynamic range compression applied FM, I just hate its betrayal of the sound of an orchestra. No real pianissimo & nothing approaching fff, it frustrates and disappoints. It often seems fatiguing too, sounding just "loud" all the time. And not even the most sophisticated of FM tuners (of which there is a long and wonderful tradition of design) can do anything about this.

So it's always iPlayer HD-Hi for me, usually via iTunes. When I had a sudden problem with dropouts during the season a change of adsl filter cured it. But it's bound to depend on local conditions - even your current deal, since some budget options reduce speeds at peak times.
(I'm on BT Option 2).

Gave up on DAB long ago - even 192kbps mp2 copes badly with orchestral strings - theoretically, band-limiting the highest frequencies could improve it...

[Stunsworth]

Virgin Media: Sounds identical to Freeview in quality to me and I don't need the TV on. However, a minor glitch about every 10 to 15 minutes. I think they multiplex all the radio channels together, probably using TV frame based locking and it slips because Capital radio/Clsaaic FM/BBC/Kiss FM etc are not all locked to the same reference. All radio channels do it and it sounds like the brief hiccup...

I'm glad to hear it's not just me. Spoils what is otherwise a useful service.

I've only managed to listen to a few proms using the iTunes HD radio station directly into my DAC and from that into the power amplifiers. It's sounded excellent on the broadcasts I've managed to catch.

[Sydney Grew]

Many thanks to OldTechie for his reply (number three), which I found informative in a multitude of ways . . .

[OldTechie]

Referring to the glitch I had on Virgin Media R3:

I'm glad to hear it's not just me. Spoils what is otherwise a useful service.

I persuaded them to replace my Standard Definition STB with a new Cisco HD one - and the Radio 3 glitches were fixed. So even if you don't care about an HD TV feed, upgrading the box is worthwhile.