Reading Room: articles about radio, streaming and podcasts

Yesterday we made for you a selection of 12 channels on YouTube about the device acoustics. Today, fifteen materials from our “ Hi-Fi World ” are waiting for you, in which we speak about Soviet-era radio plays, the present and future of streaming services and trends in the podcast market.


Photo by Darren Cowley / PD

About radio and radio presenters

• “How it works”: radio is the end of a beautiful era. In this article, we understand how the radio works: what kind of software do radio presenters use, what is the broadcast format and how many people do they need to launch a radio station. We tell you how the radio attracts the audience and why lately the interest in traditional radio has been falling.

• 6 myths about radio presenters. We discuss popular myths about working on the radio and talk about how the radio host’s day goes, who writes the news for the release and why live broadcasts are not a hobby, but painstaking daily work. In parallel, we will give a couple of tips on how to “fill a vacancy” at the station.

• Sound shows: very well forgotten old. In the mid-1920s, almost everything that existed in the cultural field — books, comics, and musicals — became radio-spectros. For radio, many well-known dramatist authors wrote, from Bertolt Brecht to Max Frish. This article is about how the history of radio plays began, and how it ended. We will share the most famous radio shows and tell interesting stories related to them: why the “War of the Worlds” by HG Wells is considered the “mother of fake news” and which of the old plays are still played on the radio.

• Russian radio plays: from the “Baby Monitors” to “Solaris”. Radio plays were popular among Soviet and later Russian listeners. In this material, we recall the projects that influenced the generation of schoolchildren in the 1970s, talk about radio shows from books by science fiction writers Brothers Strugatsky and Stanislav Lem, as well as radio plays based on works of Russian classics. What episode was crossed out by the Soviet censor from Solaris, but entered into a radio show? What heroine of Dostoevsky’s novel was voiced by Faina Ranevskaya? What famous performance was written specifically for the radio? Answers to these questions can be found in the article.

• Fairy tales in the USSR: the story of "child" vinyl. Audio shows for children were recorded on vinyl and flexible records of the record company Melodiya. Famous singers and actors took part in the work on them. In the voice of Oleg Tabakov, Ali Baba speaks in “Ali Baba and 40 thieves”, Mikhail Boyarsky voiced the king in “The Bremen Town Musicians”. Songs of Vladimir Vysotsky sound in "Alice in Wonderland." We offer together with us to remember your favorite works from childhood.

• “Let's dance again”: why is it still too early to bury the radio? Another article on the topic of radio and its future. This time we understand if there is an alternative to broadcasting and why people still listen to FM radio. We will discuss the evolution of the format and the new modern approaches to broadcasting.

• What radio listeners and radio hosts hate. Not all audio content on the radio is perceived by the audience positively. Exactly as not all messages of the listeners evoke a positive reaction from the presenters. What is more annoying - a call asking you to say hello in the middle of a serious discussion or a proposal to change the music format? Let's try to understand mutual claims and look at them from different sides.

About streaming services

• What is it: the Russian market of streaming services. According to the report of the RIAA Association, in 2017 the most of the profits of the music industry were brought by streaming services. In this article, we focused on the Russian streaming market, which is also on the rise. We are talking about the main trends in the industry: how streaming platforms deal with piracy and what cooperation with mobile operators gives them.

• Comparative test of Internet radio stations with a lossless stream. Currently, a number of audiophile services, such as Tidal, provide access to lossless radio as part of a subscription. However, in Russia this service is not yet available. Therefore, here we propose to consider the online radio stations, which give listen to Hi-Res-audio without restrictions. We will tell you how to set up a lossless stream and test Internet stations with different music formats.

Photo PxHere / PD
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• “For every taste”: streaming services for listening to music. The choice of streaming service depends on the needs of the user. In this article, we have identified six features (from the size of the library to the number of playlists for running), for each of which we selected our own “music application”.

• Join the stream: The present and the future of musical streaming. Over time, popular music is changing, just like the ways to listen to it: from music pieces on a gramophone to a selection of your favorite songs on your smartphone. We write about the history of the development of streaming, the features of the algorithms of well-known services, and tell you what role the network has played for the peering file sharing Napster.

About podcasts and podcasters

• "Good morning, Vietnam!": How to start your Internet radio. How to launch an Internet radio station - talking about the main points of the process organization and sharing the nuances. Let us evaluate the importance of an extraordinary presentation of the material on the example of the Internet radio station "Chiplduk", we will help you decide on the software and the "iron". After reading, you will have a ready action plan that can be used as a checklist before launching your station.

Photo PxHere / PD

• Audio Search, Audio SEO, and Podcast Help - Google experts are already working on this. The number of American podcast listeners has doubled over the past five years. Google paid attention to this and decided to develop a search system for podcasts. We describe how this solution will work and take a look at the future plans of the IT giant: drawing up a list of recommendations for an Internet show using geolocation and the type of listening device.

• Acquaintance with the new auditoriums of Audiomania: the transcript of the podcast “Sound”. The podcast “ Sound ” has been released since 2014, in it we share the features of the choice of professional and home audio equipment, discuss the latest trends in the world of Hi-Fi and the acoustics of brands, and also understand the features of different audio formats. This article is a transcript of the podcast release , where we discuss how to choose the right acoustics for a home theater and talk about the technologies on which the cinema hall is built in the “Audiomania” showroom .

• We discuss the Hi-Fi trends: the sound show transcript. Another transcript of the podcast release "Sound" . It is dedicated to the strangeness of HD-audio technology, miniaturization of audio equipment, the advantages of multi-room systems and smart speakers - in particular, their functionality and “stuffing”.

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Our Telegram channel is about sound in microformat:

Brief history of rock
Unusual audio gadgets
Built-in Acoustics Guide
How does the pop industry earn now?

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