Radio Rock 106.6

Out of 400 entries in Italy, this one ranks 76. 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.

A rock station on a dial where rock is one of the commonest tags: 4 entries in Italy lead with it. The tags are broadcaster-supplied throughout, so read the count as how Italy's broadcasters describe themselves.

On the same tag worldwide it is 18 of 148, which is inside the top quarter of every rock station the directory carries.

Radio Rock 106.6 streams at 64 kbps against Italy's median of 128, which is less than half the local norm. On a dial where 70% of stations reach 128 kbps, a rate this low stands out, and it usually means either a speech station that never needed more or an encoder that has not been touched in years.

The format here is AAC+, against a listing for Italy 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.

The stream is served from rrock.fluidstream.eu, an address one other entry in Italy uses as well. A small shared host is usually a group of stations under one owner or one technical provider rather than a platform.