We thought that you might like to know what makes us tick. There’s actually quite a bit that goes on behind the scenes to deliver our high quality audio to your computer or mobile device. We have gone through great lengths to make sure that our stream is crystal clear despite some of the challenges broadcasting on the web poses. Our massive music library resides on redundant 4TB hard drives giving us plenty of room to store and back up our music. All of our music originates uncompressed and is stored as linear .wav (PCM) to reduce coding artifacts at the origin. The bulk of our music library comes from TM Studio’s Gold Disc library, which over the years, has become the broadcast standard. We also have many out-of-print and rare tracks which have been re-mastered in house from vinyl or the original source CD. Our PC based music automation system is responsible for scheduling and playing back our music. We give our scheduling software some programming parameters for each hour of the day and it composes a log (playlist) for each hour based on a number of variables.
Once the music leaves the automation system, it gets fed digitally in to our digital mixing console which combines microphones, CD players, and a couple of Technics turntables. The output of the mixer is then fed in to our audio processor specifically designed for webcasting which keeps the program levels consistent and adds a signature to the sound. As audio purists, we aim to achieve an open competitive sound versus a louder, over compressed sound. Once the audio is processed, it leaves the processor and is digitally fed in to our Icecast/Shoutcast encoder which sends a high quality 128K mp3 and a 64K HE-AAC feed over to our stream provider. So there you have it, our technology in a nutshell. Thanks for geekin’ out with us for a few minutes, feel free to contact us with any random questions.
