Listening to the OggFLAC stream of Absolute Radio, music sounds fantastic with audio information up to 20 kHz. However the vocals sound VERY saturated in the midrange (obviously processed for intelligibility on broadcast) but they seem to have overegged the pudding on this. Vocals have a characteristic ‘crunch’, bang in the centre of the midrange frequencies, which makes it harder to actually understand what they’re saying. I’ve achieved similar results in the past in mixing sessions when I’ve driven signal past 0dbFS then hard limited it; it’s digital distortion.

Does anyone at Absolute Radio responsible for imaging or broadcast processing lurk on the forums or is there a contact for their radio techs to provide some listener feedback? Music generally sounds good (although high freqs are a bit ‘distressed’ from the compression) but the speech really does sound dismal. Even on the 32 kbps AAC+ stream you can detect it.