David Damiral of World Vision has emailed us all the way from Mozambique... "Hi Folks, just a quick note of appreciation of your web initiative. You are achieving the best quality audio I have yet heard at 28k, and it's a pleasure to hear South Coast Brit. voices down hear in Mozambique. Interesting programming, too. Keep it up!

Alan Brown writes: One of most surprising things was the sound quality, or rather the lack of it, coming from major players such as the BBC. I guess that they regard Internet broadcasting as an afterthought, and are simply taking the audio feed to the transmitter and encoding it for the Internet. My own experiments have shown that a highly compressed 'bright' sound as favoured for radio transmission is the worst thing to use for Internet broadcasting. Too much compression means that undersirables such as breath sounds & studio ambience are encoded as 'mushies', and too much treble causes sibilance and 'flanging' effects. Moderate compression is desirable however, as without it, any subtleties or quiet passages would be lost on most PC sound systems. So a 'from the ground up' approach was taken for BIRSt. (written in 2001)