Twice in this month I've heard ultra low quality music on community FM radio here in Australia. I am not talking stock 128k, I am talking about 64k mp3 or those kazaa files transcoded 10 times with ringing so bad that can make me vomit.

The thing that really pissed me is that the DJ or host made absolutely no mention of this and instead said how much she loved the song/band. These people are either braindeaf or they are simply don't care for anything to do with acceptable broadcasting. Anyway I send an email complaint to one stations.

I hear ugly WMA@48 artifacts on some FM-stations of Russia...

I 100% agree that I've heard some REALLY crap audio played on Australian radio. I live in Melborne and I find that it's the mainstream stations that are culprate.
I personally listen to JJJ and I have NEVER heard compressed audio on the airwaves. However stations like FOX, MMM & Nova play crappy MP3s all the time - however people who listen to those stations frequently are generally ignorant enough to not notice.

My brother just told me that SYNFM also plays crap sounding MP3s.

Sorry freaky, the J's is guilty as charged. Where do you think they got their "prerelease" version of Radiohead's last album in early 03. I have heard them play encoded audio (with artifacts) on several occasions.

I will point out though, that it is NOT that often. Great station, and the ABC now has an online radios station as well.

Not speaking about (dynamic range) compression/clipping, I can't hear lossy compression artifacts on FM that often. I listen to several mostly private mainstream pop stations. I remember one song on my favorite station I could swear it had been a lossy codec, though.
in general it is very hard to hear any lossy codec-based artifacts on FM radio, because it's again clipped, compressed, EQ'd and so on.
I'm beginning to believe that almost all FM artifacts (except the noise, probably) I hear are caused by the station and not by the FM system or because it's analog. Analog FM/TV could sound much much better, and I think they did in the past.

I'd have thought that few people would notice poor quality as many people use radio for nothing other than background music i.e they don't really "listen". I like to think I'm an audiophile but, I'm guilty of the same. Besides, so many people listen to FM radio on crap hardware!

There is no need for any bad equipment to notice bad sound quality. What sounds bad on high-end equipment still sounds bad on low-end hardware.
I have a cheap small clockradio without cable antenna, it awakens me in the morning. And then half-sleeping I notice...(some clipping distortions, for example)

They did it again!!! this time its a video clip on RAGE - I don't even need to listen to the original. Its like Kazaa TV !

Also I might add that I listened through poor equip (a TV).

Syn FM do it all the time... they don't have much choice seeing as they're run out of the union building at RMIT. hell, they probably can't even afford CDs.

FM radio usually gets a big fat lowpass at 16k (though some don't, and some even run right up against the 19k pilot tone).

i don't have a working radio at the moment (my friend has a nasty habit of trying to get the car radio working by thumping the dashboard. of course it's never worked since), but i've heard a lot of lossy stuff on air. triple-J even played "come on fhqwhgads" from www.homestarrunner.com on several occasions. they tried to get it on hottest 100 i think.

i suppose FM is regarded as a low-fi format, and often encoding programs will set 112 or even 96 kbps as "FM quality", so people on FM probably think they can get away with it.

however, pre-echo can never be an analog artefact using normal processing hardware. what's more, pre-echo will make it through the bandpassed clipping, phase-mangling and hardcore compression that FM processors do, because it's time based, not frequency based (you can also hear ringing through all this, but often it can be hidden by all the distortion).

i've also noticed that purely by chance, FM can appear to generate lossy-sounding artefacts that are actually not from lossy codecs. i have no idea what causes this (is there some kind of variable lowpass at work on some stations? that is my suspect).

btw, it's not the function of JJJ and Rage to be hi-fi. they are there to play the stuff the commercial stations are too goddamn gutless to play. why do you reckon you hear things on commercial stations as "new releases" that you heard several months ago on JJJ? non-commercial and community broadcasters are free from ratings, and so they can play stuff without fear of being "unpopular". of course, this isn't always true...

if you want decent quality, try ABC classic. they don't compress things too hard (if at all). they annouoncers are vomitously pretentious, though. hehe.. they wonder why classical isn't very popular when their announcers are so patronising?

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btw, minidisc is used all the time on almost every radio station in existence. mostly for interviews, of course.