ABC Classic HLS

ABC Classic HLS is deep in Australia's listing, at 96 of 140. Down here the ordering barely orders anything: the difference between one position and the next is often a single recorded open, so treat the neighbours below as a shelf rather than as a ranking.

At 252 kbps the stream is on the better side of Australia's dial, where the median is 128 kbps. Not dramatically so, and bitrate is only one of several things that decide whether a stream sounds good, but it is the one the directory records.

The stream is served as an HLS playlist, which is the format broadcasters use to switch bitrates on the fly and the one a plain browser audio element will not open. Nothing is wrong with the station; the player on this page simply cannot follow that kind of link without a library. The extension carries one and handles it.

The stream address on this entry points at mediaserviceslive.akamaized.net, which is where 27 other stations in Australia are served from as well. Platforms of that size carry the long tail of a country's dial, and they are the reason a listing can look broken when it is one host having a quiet hour.

ABC Classic HLS and Double J QLD are described by the directory in very nearly the same fields, which makes the differences between them worth stating rather than leaving to be inferred. The broadcaster tagged this entry abc, classical and public radio, which the other entry is not tagged with.