Online Radio

"Hear the sound a paradigm makes as it shifts."
- Radio HK's Internet-Radio press release.

During the early 1960's, radio station XERB, broadcasting out of Tijuana, blasted a massive FCC-illegal signal to the north. You could drive coast to coast across America and never lose the music, an eclectic mix of rock, rhythm-and-blues, and just plain weirdness. They introduced an entire generation to free form, no-holds-barred radio. Now, there's a facility which does that and more - over the Internet.

By transmitting over the Net, RealAudio and technologies like it, stand poised to turn the entire music industry on its ear. Just about anyone can now broadcast and receive music, world-wide. To listen, it doesn't take much - just a basic multimedia-capable computer (a 486 running Windows, or a System 7 Mac), a 14.4 bps modem, and a standard SLIP/PPP Internet connection. And best of all, the software is free!

Tonight, I'm sitting at my desk listening to the local news in Hawaii. But I'm not in Honolulu. I'm right here in San Francisco, shivering in the fog. I move over to Internet Radio Hawaii's "Music to Cruise By" series. Sinuous, seductive Polynesian music suddenly fills the room. It feels warmer, somehow.

From there I jump over to Prague, and then to the Netherlands. Or how about some peppy, Korean synth/hip-hop, or the hypnotic, brooding strains of the Australian didgeridoo. It's all out there, just for the taking, the choices growing by the day.

Until now, to hear music or sound over the Internet required lengthy "downloads" of individual sound files. The old rule of thumb was that it took five times as long to obtain the file as to ultimately play it. So, for a three minute cut, you'd sit waiting fifteen minutes. And from there, once it arrived on your hard disk, you had to run a special program to "play" the file.

Now, that's all past. With recent developments in "file streaming" technology, you can listen to the song while it downloads - just-in-time delivery, if you will. The audio is digitally "compressed" in such a way (1 Kbyte per second in size) that the real-time sound "stream" fits well within the bandwidth capability of your modem connection.

But compression takes its toll. The RealAudio people portray their 14.4 bps sound quality as "similar to AM radio," but that's being generous. It's fine for the spoken word, but with music, particularly anything complex and grungey, it's a bit like a boom-box cranked up to distortion level - even when it's not. And there's a weird, phase-shifting quality to the sound, like a soft, robotic wind blowing through the background.