FIP (hifi.aac)

Out of 710 entries in France, this one ranks 124. The upper quarter of a national list is an interesting place to be: well known enough to have accumulated opens, not so well known that it is the station everybody already had.

Nothing else in France's listing leads with misc. The tag is self-declared, which makes it a statement of how the broadcaster positions itself rather than a classification anyone audited, and on this dial that statement is unique.

Across every country, FIP (hifi.aac) is 6 of the 28 stations leading with misc, by the same open count the country list uses.

At 192 kbps the stream is on the better side of France'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 format here is AAC, against a listing for France overwhelmingly made of MP3. Both play in a browser; the difference shows up in how much quality survives at a given bitrate, where AAC has the advantage at lower rates.

20 of France's entries are served from icecast.radiofrance.fr, this one among them. A shared host means a shared fate. If this stream is silent, the fastest check is not this station's own site but whether its neighbours on the same platform are playing.