The pyramid of conflict says you can have good, cheap or fast, but not all three.

Streaming is a textbook case of this. We have seen data transfer rates rise and connectivity prices fall, which recently got us wondering about streamed music quality.

We wondered: Could we combine what we know about AoIP with what we know about on-air audio processing to improve the quality of streamed music? Could we give streamers a fuller sound and bring out those crisp highs, that deep bass like we’ve been able to capture with our new X5 FM/HD audio processor? And, could we then push all that through a codec whose job is to lose as many bits as the pipe can handle, often indiscriminate of which ones? 

We not only could, but we did. StreamBlade was introduced at IBC this month as a multi-stream appliance for our WheatNet-IP audio network that has selectable Opus, AAC and MP3 encoding and AGC, peak limiter and other processing tools specifically designed to optimize the sound quality of encoded audio content.

It turns out that with the right amount and type of audio processing, you can play to the psychoacoustical characteristics of lossy codecs to get that fuller sound, crisp highs and deep bass. Here are six things to keep in mind. 

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Streaming. Everyone’s doing it, but as we quickly learned from our friends at StreamGuys, there are a few things that divide the men from the boys.

StreamGuys is an industry-leading service provider of live and on-demand streaming, podcasting delivery, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) toolsets for enterprise-level broadcast media organizations. We got to know the guys at StreamGuys while developing StreamBLADE, our new WheatNet-IP audio network appliance with selectable Opus, AAC and MP3 encoders as well as AGC, peak limiter and other audio processing designed to optimize the performance of encoded audio.

Here, in a recent conversation with SteamGuys’ Tim Labelle, we talk about the tools and trade of streaming for broadcast.

WS: What do you make of the state of streaming today? Do you think streamers are thinking about audio quality now that we’re seeing developments like smart speakers bringing music back into the home?
TL: Processing always comes up when we talk to clients. And it’s clear that there’s some education that needs to take place, especially for those who don’t come from radio where there’s an obsession with quality. Often, it’s the digital media guy who’s managing the streams and he knows about bitrates and codecs but he doesn’t have much experience with signal processing and audio quality. Radio is way ahead of the regular streamer or podcaster in that regard.

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