Why do some of the acts on Howard's show sound like crap (weird in/out volume) and others are fine? I have a Sportster Replay with line out to cassete in my car and a Sanyo CR-something line in to my Yamaha receiver (w/ enhanced DSP for compressed music).

Is this a result of the compression/delivery of the signal or just poor engineering at the time of recording? (Scott the engineer should be cringing if this is so.)

Seems like the problem is mainly when a full piece electric band is playing. It sounds like a weird "pumping" (high hat and elec. instruments in/out).

I don't notice any major issues whenever it is an acoustic act or <4-6 mics needed for the recording.

What's strange is I'm listening to Lenny Kravitz do "Let Love Rule" and it sounds pretty good via FM modulator from the Sanyo to my FM tuner in my office???

Anyone else notice this??

I think it has too do with the original recording.

Either with the microphone set-ups used, or the fact that the studio's they were using at the time of most of the recordings were not exactly state of the art.

They were a radio host's studio. Nothing special.

it is the way they originally recorded it as well as the state of the "tapes" they used to port it to digital. There is only so much you can do with a bad originating master. If you ahve ever listened to the "Master Tape Theater" the difference in quality is amazing in some respects to say the least. The older recordings especially will suffer from "poor audio" since it was just the way they were recorded and the equipment the were recorded on\to.

some of the earlier HSS archives are from cassette tapes - if H hadn't insisted they be kept there'd be none, mgt wanted to reuse the tapes.

was I the only one who sufferred numerous cut-outs / re-buffering while trying to listen to the online stream of the music special? Not like my internet connection is slow (FiOS, 20mb down/ 5 up)

Made it unlistenable, and I left my radio at work thinking at home I'd just listen to the stream.

Why do some of the acts on Howard's show sound like crap...??
Scott the Engineer

I listened to the entire thing and it sounded great. The newer stuff, done at SIRIUS (Stevie Wonder, Train, etc) sounded much better than the ancient stuff, but that's to be expected.