There are so many great resources available on the internet. You probably have browser bookmarks stacked with great links. On this Off the Beaten Path, I want to share some interesting links I’ve found.
Thirty years ago Memorex used a great slogan to promote their recording tape. With digital recordings, we can often hear anomalies in recordings. We now have digital recordings of digital recordings, and of course you can’t get “something for nothing.” So taking a highly compressed MP3 and converting it back to a PCM WAV does NOT make it a CD-quality WAV. It simply puts it in that format. This link is to software that allows the user limited use of the software to analyze digital audio to determine the actual quality while providing some clue to the history of the file.
Rec Networks & FCC Data.org
Michelle “Michi” Bradley is well known in the LPFM community for her knowledge of the FCC, tech knowledge and licensing issues related to stations. These two websites, RecNet and FCC Data are related to her work and are excellent engineering resources.
Fellow Radio World contributor Scott Fybush has a great website, but his own business site contains many interesting engineering and radio related links.
This link contains dozens of links to different equipment manufacturers. It’s not complete and a few are out of date, but it’s a handy reference.
Longley-Rice Prediction
There are numerous websites with varying qualities of Longley-Rice map predictions. Here are two. The first is from Nautel. To use it you will need to create a free account. And this one is from the Communications Research Center of Canada.
Society of Broadcast Engineers
The SBE has some excellent resources. As a member, you can access things like jobs and some free webinars. But they now have a new second level of membership which is only slightly more expensive (Called SBE MemberPlus) for $175 (instead of $85) which opens up the entire archive of webinars (over 60) to Plus members! From networking to RF webinars, the library is wide open and an excellent resource.
And Finally …
Here’s an interesting video on how a studio mishap changed the sound of music in the ’80s and how that sound keeps resurfacing. The culprit is “gated reverb.”
If you stumble across a good or unusual website that might be of interest, please don’t hesitate to send me the link and any info you might have about it. My email address is [email protected].
