Problem with NPR


Listening to recent WI Public Radio recent fund drive they received thousands of donations from 49 states and 50 countries(not popular in Alaska) .
No doubt many came from folks who cycled through one of the worlds greatest research universities ,UW- Madison, but I suspect many 'philes are in on WPR as well.

They send an uncompressed signal and use Teac Esoteric players as well as SP-10's with what looked like, when I was there a few years ago anyway, Sumiko arms with Denon 103's.

Programming is OUTSTANDING , on -air folks are musicans and scholars that say just what you need to know and no more.
All complete works, no bleeding chunks, every facet of classical music from every age and style, in their 50K item library. Often live music , perfectly miked in superb studios.
My problem? I live few miles from their 300 foot tower for Western WI and I can find no way to beat the sound of their signal , nor can several friends who have much more expensive systems than I .
Classical is from 9AM to 3PM Central and 8PM to 5AM Central weekdays , mucho specials and MET on weekends.
If any "steamers" out there I'd love your opinions .
Mine is WPR is best in nation, I know, fact certain they beat anything in Germany and UK, about the only thing I can think of here that does.
schubert
I am glad you brought this up. I listen to Radio Paradise almost every day. The fidelity is astounding. I emailed them asking what do they do to make it sound so darn good. Bill was nice enough to respond. He uses hi res digital lossless music almost exclusively, processed through an Orban Optimod PC card. While my digital music sounds superb through my Benchmark DAC, Radio Paradise makes beautiful music as well. So good when I go to turn it off at night I end up turning it up.
-John
Always looking for high quality radio sources. Will have to search it out on internet radio and give it a try. Thanks for the tip.

I'm also a Radio Paradise fan. Interesting to read about the technical details behind different Internet radio stations. Some like Radio Paradise sound top notch, while others are quite sub-par. Bitrates help but alone do not guarantee anything. So many ways to process things digitally to yield good, bad, unique, different results. A lot more variety that matters to digest there I would say than what it takes these days to get good sound out of a home audio system. At its best, digital internet radio sources can be as good or perhaps better even these days than most things most people have listened to in the past, though there is a lot of garbage to sort through in the process.

My two current long running internet radio staples are Radio Paradise and WWOZ New Orleans, which has always had fabulous content and I am finding the feed I use these days can sound quite good as well, which was not the case just a year or two back.

Still haven't settled on any clear favorites for Classical. We still have a very good quality classical only FM radio station here in BAltimore/DC area that I still tend to lean on a lot.
For classical really enjoy Radio Swiss Classical and their other broadcasts specializing in sub genres within classical.
I just did a search for internet stations on my Squeezebox
using the word "audiophile" and found several
classical, jazz and blues oriented "audiophile"
stations streaming at 320 kbps and they all sound very good.