Re: [ARSCLIST] Compression (was Re: [ARSCLIST] A fundamental Flaw ...)

[John Ross <johnross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Boston Symphony and their broadcast partner, WGBH-FM took great care to
broadcast the orchestra's concerts in the cleanest possible sound. Among
other things, they used a Dolby A system to encode the signals from
Tanglewood, the BSO's summer home, before pushing them through 15 kHz
stereo telephone lines.

This worked fine during their initial tests, but on the first broadcast,
the sound quality was awful; it sounded like the equalization on the phone
lines had gone completely to hell. After many heated telephone
conversations with New England Telephone, they discovered the reason:
Because this was a high-prestige project, the telco folks were carefully
monitoring the transmission. When they heard the Dolby-encoded signal, they
thought something had gone terribly wrong, so they tried to re-equalize the
signal to get rid of the imbalance.

John Ross
Seattle


At  1/24/2005 05:47 AM, you wrote:
> Another frustrating example, the set of broadcast performances issued by
> the Boston Symphony...mastering done by our "friends" at EMI. Having some
> second generation copies of the broadcast masters, I was disappointed with
> the BSO issue. Listening carefully, I could hear changes in the noise
> level, suggesting the engineer had done some additional compression to the
> already compressed broadcast masters. When I finally got to the engineer,
> he responded..."people prefer it that way." From my perspective, very sad.