SWR3 - 96K AAC

Out of 1,409 entries in Germany, this one ranks 115. 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.

The directory counts 20 opens against this stream. That is well above Germany's median and it is the reason the station sits where it does on the country list, since the ordering is the count and nothing else.

SWR3 - 96K AAC streams at 96 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.

SWR3 - 96K AAC streams in AAC while most of Germany'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.

36 of Germany's entries are served from liveradio.swr.de, 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.