A good point! We'll have to see what shakes out as the experimenters "experiment" with linking digital systems.

73 de Tim, AF1G

---- Tyrell Berry <kd7kuj@...> wrote:

=============
When dealing with music, I consider myself an audiophile. When I buy a CD,
I rip it to my home server in the FLAC format; No, I don't carry loss less
audio around on my portable devices... But I like AAC when my player
supports it, and MP3 when it doesn't. My primary concern with storing my
primary source in either lossy format is that if I convert between the two,
it's going to lose MORE data/quality with each conversion... Lossy on top
of lossy is bad.

The same is true of these vocoders... They are all lossy formats... And at
such low band widths, they don't leave much left over to be lost again. My
point is this: A transcoder between any two formats that use different
vocoders will significantly degrade the audio quality... Maybe it will
still be legible, but I doubt it will be a pleasant experience.

In light of that, going from one digital mode to another may or may not be
considered worse than going from FM to digital, depending on the real world
performance of that double (or potentially triple in a poorly optimized
network) lossy conversion.