I have started a week trial of the Symphony.Live streaming service. Anybody here have any thoughts on the service?
I had never heard of it before. It seems to have a reasonable inventory. It says some is available in 4K but does not say how much. I can find no detail on their current audio specifications. They say they are considering high res and Atmos. High res is a waste of space. All you need is lossless CD quality. It will be tough to get true Atmos. As far as I know the BPO are the only orchestra regularly producing Atmos content. I doubt they are making the recordings but using material their organizations have been making, or more likely their local, or national broadcasters.
There is no doubt in my mind that the BPO are the world leaders in live broadcasts and streaming of archived concerts and that is by a big margin. They have been improving Atmos quality at pace, and have made steady improvements. All concerts are streamed in 4K and lossless FLAC and AFLAC. There is no way to stream Atmos with lossless audio currently, it is against the regs. However it is very good. For Atmos you have to adhere to EBU audio specs and Dolby enforce this. That is -18 LUFs. That is a lower level then people are generally used to. However the European Broadcasting Union are advising all audio streams be normalized to -18 LUFs. This is now also the recommendation of AES. The reason is that on peaks there are errors and problems on the peaks. So a higher dynamic range and cleaner audio is obtained by normalizing to -18 LUFs. I have personally confirmed this, and now normalize my Wav. files to -18 LUFs. The downside is that it requires the audio chain to have superior SNR, which is tough on cheaper equipment. It does produce a cleaner result though. The BPO seem to be gradually decreasing their average level.
I also subscribe to Medici TV that give a good service and I also subscribe to MetPlayer. Their audio is now lossless CD quality and excellent
So I am not inclined to subscribe to another service at present. There are only so much time you can devote to this. But I will stay tuned on this new comer.
The major concern I have about this service is that they are not very forthcoming on their technical details.
