Estrella 92.3 FM

Estrella 92.3 FM is deep in the Dominican Republic's listing, at 53 of 66. 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.

Estrella 92.3 FM leads with bachata, a tag 14 other stations in the Dominican Republic use and one the country hub lists among its headline genres. If the country's sound is what brought you here, this is squarely part of it.

The gap here is large: 64 kbps where the Dominican Republic's stations typically run 128. Rates at this level were designed for dial-up and for mobile data that was billed by the megabyte, and plenty of stations simply never changed the setting.

Estrella 92.3 FM streams in AAC while most of the Dominican Republic's dial is MP3. Codec choice is mostly invisible to a listener, and it is one of the clearest fingerprints of which hosting provider a station uses, since providers default their customers into a format and few customers ever change it.

Its audio comes straight from c13.radioboss.fm:18187, an address unique to this entry in the Dominican Republic's listing. That is the simplest case there is, and it is the one where pressing play tells you the whole truth about whether the station is on air.