MDR Klassik

In Germany's ordering this is number 826 of 1,409, which is the middle of the list. The stations either side of it are a better guide to what the country sounds like than the head of the list is, because the head is the same few famous streams in every country.

MDR Klassik streams at 102 kbps, under Germany's median of 128 kbps. A lower rate is not automatically worse: speech carries perfectly well below the music threshold, and a station built for phones on a weak connection has a good reason to encode this way.

The format here is AAC, against a listing for Germany 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.

This one is HLS, a segmented format rather than a single continuous stream. It is worth knowing because the failure is specific and fixable rather than a dead station: the address works, the browser just cannot open that shape of address unaided.

Its audio comes from radio-hls.mdr.de. Four other stations in Germany stream from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.