People from Andy's formative ....... Part 3 (Part 1)

Indeed. I am appalled by some of the stuff my wife watches - BGT, I’m A Celebrity, Big Brother etc. But then I have to acknowledge the she finds my choices (Match of the Day, Question Time etc) equally offensive.

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Phillistines the lot of you!

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If Napster was to return Richard, you can be sure I wouldn’t be searching and downloading from your shared tunes :slight_smile:

Don’t worry, the feeling is mutual!

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Inextricably linked, for me, with Terry Pratchet’s “Soul Music” ( Soul Music | Discworld Wiki | Fandom ).

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For me it was the muddy recording that I really couldn’t stomach. The same reason why Oasis tracks grate on me. I’m no audiophile mind. I believe Oasis was mixed to sound better out of a crap stereo (mono)? Makes no sense to me. Contrast with Tracy Chapman’s first album and it all seems like excuses.

RIP the man.

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Not one for me either.
I went to the Somerset Tribute Festival last summer and there was a Meat Loaf tribute quite high up the bill.
I only knew the one song, so an apt time to visit the bar.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who couldn’t stand his music. He was like the Dan Brown of rock.
73 Matt

Things were even more dire if you were into jazz. A weekly half hour program on radio 3 and a weekly hour on radio 2 and that’s yer lot! OTOH the central library had an outstanding collection on vinyl and I had a decent tape recorder…

Then there was classical music, plenty of it on radio 3 but it was nearly all the three B’s and a weekly opera, and an occasional self-conscious nod towards the Second Viennese School. The efforts of the current crop were rarely allowed to be heard. At least you didn’t get chunks ripped out of major works and played in isolation the way that Classic FM (spit) does!

Pop, jazz, classical, it was all (quite understandably) heavily biased towards the popular taste, and things haven’t changed all that much on the main channels, there’s just more choice tucked in around the edges! Thank God on your knees for Youtube!

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I suppose the one advantage of haveing 3 terrestrail channels and no interweb was that no one else had any electronics, and there was much less RF noise. Given the choice I think that I would still have the “27 channels of crap” on the tv ( well we actually have rather more than that, but I was trying to get a lyric in ) and RF noise rather than what we had in the 70’s. At least now we can climb to an RF free hill and unless you are particularly masochistic not need to carry 40 Kg or radio gear and batteries to have a QSO…

I lived by a main road in my 70cm days. Virtually every vehicle that passed radiated ignition noise, quite a few were extremely noisy. Next door had a TV that radiated timebase harmonics all over the 70cm band. It wasn’t as bad as today, but it was no paradise - and there was no DSP to save the day!

Bat out of Hell is a classic and bombastic rock opera from a few years before my time (I was 6) and a time when Prog and heavy rock were probably the only types of rock to be taken seriously.

It’s great. A classic. A guilty pleasure perhaps? More popular with women of my age group and older I suspect.

We saw Meatloaf live in Glasgow 10 years ago. Unfortunately he could no longer hold the high notes. It’s a shame when artists don’t know when to call it a day.

We used to sing Bat out of Hell at the back of the school bus.
Every night.

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As an actor and not musical, you @MM0FMF would not count Hardy Krugeras significant in your past. His strking blue eyes and blond hair were always very noticeable to me in his film appearances. Left us January 19, 2022, aged 93

I forgot about him Jim but saw the news of his death. I clearly remember when I first saw him. He played the aircraft designer in Flight Of The Phoenix and stood out in the role. That film was shown sometime during the Christmas break when I was probably 8-10. I was fascinated by the guys in a crashed plane making a new plane out of the remains. It’s a fine 60s men against adversity film. his hair and eyes were striking. He was in Hatari! with John Wayne and that was also on the telly around the same time. Memorable for Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” tune. And Elsa Martinelli :wink:

That’s a fun one to play!

I was listening to a radio program about DAB in the UK that said the number of channels was prioritised ahead of bandwidth (don’t know if that is still the case). So, not only do you have dozens of channels that are all garbage, the bitrate is down the toilet as well!
73 de Matt

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Yes Matt. DAB BBC R4 is mono 64kbps MP2 and old FM BBC4 is stereo with a response out to 15kHZ. Now for a mainly speech channel (news, current affairs) you might say mono is fine. Except there are enough plays etc. that listening between the two shows stereo field being used, people enter on side and exit the other etc. Listening to The Archers on DAB is impossible as there is no ambience.

Commercial channels are shoe-horned in with 112kbps for music stations being used but often less.

We wont go into the dire coverage in GM. My old car was a 2010 vintage Audi and its original owner put a £1300 audio upgrade it. CDs and 320k VBR MP3 sounded wonderful as there were 12 speakers and plenty of watts to go around. Then you would suffer DAB stations compressed dynamic range and lack of stereo soundstage. But most of the time it was cutting in and out because there’s insufficient ERP at the transmitters compared with analogue FM.

We wont go into the fact that Bauer Media have bought most of the commercial stations and now there may be plenty of local stations but they all transmit the same music at the same time and the only thing truly local at the adverts.

Dire.

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Count your blessings! FM stereo may be old, but it was preceded by AM mono radio on the medium and long waves, and I doubt that the response went much above 5 kHz…and we thought that was marvellous! When I was very small we listened to 78 rpm disks on a hand-cranked turntable and that was truly abysmal! Of course collectors rave over those old 78 rpm disks, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

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But Brian… FM was added as an improvement over AM. There was more bandwidth available so we got stereo and hifi. The BBC engineers (broadcast, transmission, studio) did wonders and the technical excellence they put in to making the sound great was brilliant. Dab is billed as the improvement to FM because “look at the choice of stations”.

DAB is a massively technical solution that for dumb reasons uses a 30yr old CODEC. CODEC tech has improved massively in 30 years but because DAB has been forced and there’s lots of old DAB radios that are stuck with the old CODEC, there is no way to software upgrade receivers. We get lots of stations that sound awful but when people complain it sounds worse than old FM they are called elitist because there’s now so much choice for people to pick from. You will remember the TV comedy “Never mind the quality feel the width.” well it’s the same for DAB, “never mind the quality look at all the identikit Bauer stations you can choose from”.

We have a technically obsolete solution being pushed, no way to upgrade in situ that sounds inferior to a 70 year old solution. It’s not progress if it doesn’t sound as good or better.

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Rather unusually at home we have DAB coverage and more-or less nothing else usable without an external antenna. We are even in the wrong place for 198KHz LW - so for Upper Teesdale the 64 or 112 Kb is better than the quality of audio that is possible on FM. I was using interweb radio to listen to the BBC 15 years ago… ( Mind you the whole lot fell over after Storm Arwen, DAB, all mobile networks and although no -one has admitted it probably the police network too… it is stuck up the same masts )
One other advantage of DAB is the World Service - makes a interesting listen…

Paul

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