muzak audio quality

[fedupwithcablevision590]

Heard it finally on a Dish network demo at a local Sears store. The mono channels sound awful. It's not just that they are in mono. The audio compression is heavy, worse than an FM station. It's mainly the DIGITAL compression, sounds like 64kbps mp3. I know it is an MPEG-2 something they use, but what's the bitrate? The stereo muzak channels sounded better, but most of the good programming is on the mono ones.
For some reason that audio doesn't sound so bad when I'm at my local Wendy's, but through any consumer home equipment is sounds awful.
The sirius audio wasn't great either, sounded very overmodulated, worse than their subscriber internet streams.
I'm curious to hear other Dish customers opinions on the muzak and sirius audio. Maybe it was just a bad setup in the store.

 

[KE4EST]

I don't listen to the 'muzak' channels anymore but the sirius ones sound great to me. I would say the store had a bad set-up.

 

[bjthadj]

I haven't listened to the mono Muzak channels in forever, but I just listened to 966 (used to be Eurobeat, no idea what they're calling it now) and it sounded great. Just like all of the Sirius music channels, of which I listen to all the time. I'm listening to the Sirius 128kbps webstream right now, and the Dish SQ at home blows this away.

 

[TheKrell]

The Muzak 2 channel (949) is mpeg-1 audio layer 2 mono sampled at 48kHz with 80kbps. (This is the same as all the Dish "audio" channels.) For comparison, the "CD" channels are 192kbps stereo mpeg-1 audio layer 2, and sound more like an mp3 at 128kbps to a casual listener. In other words, I'm agreeing with the OP. 966 is now called "Eurostyle", and is one of the Dish CD channels. So I'm agreeing with bjthadj as well.

Since the CD and audio channels are all FTA, I recorded them with my handy-dandy Twinhan 1025, and ran Mediainfo on them. Sirius channels are encrypted, so I have no idea what their specs are. But I gather from other comments (FTA part of this forum?) that it's not mpeg-1 audio layer 2 at all.

 

[fedupwithcablevision590]

So the mono channels are at quite a low bitrate. That would explain why I heard so many artifacts, whereas the "CD" stereo channels sound very good. I'd really like to hear some samples of this on my own "equipment". Is there anyway someone can record samples and I can download them?
Am still considering getting an FTA setup just for the muzak, but since most of the channels I like (FMONE, Expressions, 7890, 80s) are in mono, wondering if it's really worth it.

 

[aegrotatio]

I do not notice much difference between the monaural and stereo Muzak channels when listening through a stereo or tabletop FM receiver.
The Sirius channels are much the same configuration as the stereo Muzak channels are.
Many of them were not encrypted until recently.
All of the channels are Musicam (MP2).

The bit rate of the monaural channels is not really a significant measure, they're using Musicam MP2 encoding like another poster said which cannot be compared to MP3 on bitrate alone. Musicam is not as efficient in stereo as MP3 is which explains why the stereo audio requires a higher bit rate.

I agree though that the establishment you visited probably had something wrong with their setup. If the audio is loud enough to overmodulate the amplifier it would sound like digital artifacts when it actually wasn't digital artifacts.

If you get an FTA receiver you will be able to hear some more Muzak channels than DiSH Network subscribers do. It sometimes changes, but one of the hidden channels is Environmental East which is the traditional instrumental Muzak coverband channel.

 

[jeremydiederich1]

The Muzak sounds fine at my work

 

[thxdan]

A good rule of thumb for MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio is that 256kbps for stereo gets you very high quality audio--that's what NPR uses for audio distribution to its radio station affiliates (or at least they used to).

Remember that MPEG-1 Layer 2 is older than MP3, so it's less efficient and needs more bits to get the same quality. So, 256kbps MP2 = a high-quality MP3 of around 160-192 kbps.

So, if the Muzak channels are only 80 kbps in MP2, that's pretty horrendous...something like a 56 kbps MP3. Some would argue that MP3 is about twice as efficient as MP2...so that would mean Muzak is coming in at 40 kbps MP3 quality. Pretty bad.

-Dan

 

[fedupwithcablevision590]

Yeah that's what it sounds like, a 56kbps mp3 in mono. The difference was pretty obvious when switching between the low bitrate mono channels and the higher bitrate stereo channels in Sears.
The artifacts were annoying, like an artificial "squeal" at certain high frequencies in songs.
The odd thing is that I do not notice this as much in establishments that subscribe to muzak. FM1, their most popular channel (and my favorite) sounds pretty decent from the overhead speaker. Maybe because it is designed to have a much more limited dynamic range than consumer equipment, so you don't notice the artifacts from the low bitrate?
That's why I'd like a sound sample of a mono muzak channel, to listen on my own equipment. I know Dish subs cant get FM1, but anything similar would be decent (7890 sounds pretty close).
I just dont know how muzak can get decent sound in these businesses with such a low bitrate. Then again their SCA's sounded better in the businesses than my SCA enabled radio that I used to listen to FM1 with, back when they had a subcarrier in NY. Since that stopped I've been muzak-less, haven't exactly been able to find a substitute either, you'd think with the multitude of music servies, like Yahoo, AOL, Slacker, and the Music Choice I get with my cable they'd have something close...but nope.

 

[TNGTony]

One of the advantages of having been around the discussion areas (at the time alt.echostar.dbs and DBSDish.com) is remembering first hand why these channels became available to residential subscribers in the first place. Remember, these channels were only available to businesses for close to 5 years before Dish relented to pressure from the customer (and used them to fill out their numbers in the channel count nicely)

The mono channels were only made available to the public after a prolonged and incessant whine and bitch by subscribers demanding they get these channels! During that era of constant moaning for these "great channels" there were some of us out there telling people that these channels were not meant for the home consumer. They were designed for businesses where music would be piped in to speakers all over the place. These channels were never meant to be "listened to". They were meant as mental wall paper. They were meant to set a mood in a retail establishment and nothing more. Some of us brought up the fact that these channels are not only monaural, they have a highly compressed audio streams for the LEAST amount of dynamic range as to not have musical passages with low or high volume so the customers would actually pay attention to the music.

But alas, the cries and whines and moans and demands for these commercial house channels becoming available to to consumer were not stayed. When Dish came out with AT150, they decided to please the crowd with the "new" music channels as part of that package. A day later, there was a loud. "HUH? Hey, these channels sound like crap!"

WELL NO sh*t SHERLOCK!

But what did we know.

See ya
Tony

 

[fedupwithcablevision590]

Spent the better part of an hour trying to find an encoder to produce mp2's. I did the 48khz, 80kbps, mono, yup, sounds exactly like what I heard on the Sears dish demo of the mono channels. Quite poor audio quality, but suitable for background music. It sounded exactly like muzak!

 

[steve4810]

Spent the better part of an hour trying to find an encoder to produce mp2's. I did the 48khz, 80kbps, mono, yup, sounds exactly like what I heard on the Sears dish demo of the mono channels. Quite poor audio quality, but suitable for background music. It sounded exactly like muzak!

(insert sound of me slapping my forehead)