NS-Rock

Among the 24 stations in Kazakhstan with pages, NS-Rock is around the halfway mark. Anything in this stretch is reachable from the country's numbered pages rather than from its front table, which is why those pages exist.

The open count against NS-Rock is two, which is enough to know the stream has been played through the directory and not enough to compare it with anything. Small counts are the normal case out here, and a ranking built from them separates stations by luck as much as by interest.

Among 24 stations in Kazakhstan here, this is the only one that puts varios first. The varios rail below therefore leaves the country entirely, which is the more interesting direction to travel from a page like this.

The encode is 160 kbps against a country median of 128. Comfortably above the middle of Kazakhstan's listing without being one of its outliers.

Where Kazakhstan's stations mostly use MP3, this one uses AAC+. Worth a line only because it is a difference, and because the country page's format breakdown is one of the quicker ways to see which providers a national dial runs on.

The stream is served from icecast.ns.kz, which no other entry in Kazakhstan uses in this snapshot. Nothing else in the listing shares its fate: if this address stops answering it is this broadcaster's own outage, and if it plays, it plays.