Here's an interesting aspect of this discussion:
My dad and I run an FM radio station. It's a pretty low budget operation, so here's what the audio stack looks like:
-Computer playing 192 kbps MP3's (I tried to get my dad to go higher but he keeps going back to these double-blind tests he read about in which they "proved" that people can't tell the difference between 192 kbps MP3 and lossless) on a Behringer DAC (a very simple and accurate unit)
-Professional studio analog console
-Output of console goes to the input of another Behringer DAC connected to a PC, which then streams the audio over the internet (hey, it's a super low budget operation! We can't afford a dedicated lossless link) at 224 kbps MP3 to the transmitter site (the internet connection there can't handle any more than that), where there is a
-Exstreamer unit, which pulls the MP3 stream from the internet and plays it directly to the transmitter
-Audio processing inside the transmitter - very minimal stuff here, low compression, etc - mostly leveling.
-And out the signal goes!
Now I know you're going to say, "there's no way that's going to sound good at all! 192 kbps? Pfft! And you're encoding it a second time when you send it to the transmitter!"
But believe it or not, this system actually sounds very good over the FM airwaves. In fact, I dare say we have the best-sounding station in town. You can feed that audio chain any music you want, and it will be as faithfully reproduced as the FM band is capable of. Maybe we can afford to make all those supposed "quality cuts" along the way because the bottleneck is really the FM system.
We used to have a couple of Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS cards in both those PC's I mentioned, and boy, did they make the final audio sound horrible. It would sound just alright in the studio, but once it was re-encoded as MP3 and sent to the transmitter, it sounded like a speaker in a fishbowl. Switching to the highly accurate DAC boxes fixed that.
(btw, I'm sure there are people out there somewhere who can't tell the difference between 192 kbps and lossless - and I bet my mom is one of them. She keeps trying to get me to buy any old dinky little Bluetooth single speaker for my dorm room, and doesn't seem to fully appreciate the difference between that and my excellent speakers at home that she wouldn't let me take 😐)
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