WABA

WABA sits at 13 of 24 in Puerto Rico's listing, in the body of the list rather than at either end. This is where most of a national dial actually lives, and it is the part a country hub's first fifty rows never reach.

WABA streams at 32 kbps against Puerto Rico's median of 128, which is less than half the local norm. On a dial where 63% 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 Puerto Rico 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 as an HLS playlist, which is the format broadcasters use to switch bitrates on the fly and the one a plain browser audio element will not open. Nothing is wrong with the station; the player on this page simply cannot follow that kind of link without a library. The extension carries one and handles it.