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It shouldn't sound "bad", but it won't sound quite as good as regular 56k - but it should certainly be acceptable. A few things contribute to this.
1. WBZC, where the Gagliarchives broadcasts from, broadcasts at 32k Realplayer (you can listen to the original stream through their website). That's what we get to rebroadcast. The quality is actually pretty good, but since we have to rebroadcast it, there is some loss from uncompression/recompression. So, even the 128k won't sound quite as good as the original 32k realplayer stream, but it's closer to the original quality of the source stream than the 56k.
2. WBZC's server has a habit of bumping our stream (and assuming many others) down from 32k to 21k at least once in the four hour broadcast. I know Roger (and previously me) used to keep a close eye on it, and manually get it back to 32k when this happens. But sometimes he doesn't catch it, and the audio quality will go down for a significant portion of the show. Unfortunately, this also affects the recording (which is recorded off the 128k stream) for rebroadcast.
There isn't anything we can do about either item. Most solutions would involve changes at WBZC, including sending us our own higher quality bitrate stream for broadcast, finding out why the server is doing this bumping, and so on. But as Tom would surely testify, we're lucky that we're able to get streaming at all from the station!
Avian
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