The Tube | NTS

Position 193 of 466 puts this station in the middle of the United Kingdom's directory presence. The middle is worth browsing precisely because the ordering has stopped sorting by fame and has not yet stopped sorting at all.

Among 466 stations in the United Kingdom here, this is the only one that puts avant-garde first. The avant-garde rail below therefore leaves the country entirely, which is the more interesting direction to travel from a page like this.

At 256 kbps, The Tube | NTS streams at more than double the United Kingdom's median of 128 kbps. That is a deliberate choice by whoever runs it: bandwidth is the recurring cost of an internet station, and a rate this far above the local norm is money spent on sounding better than the dial around it.

The audio comes from stream-mixtape-geo.ntslive.net, and 13 other stations in the United Kingdom are served from the same address. That is a streaming platform carrying many broadcasters rather than a station running its own server, which is worth knowing for a practical reason: when a platform has a bad night, a whole block of the United Kingdom's listing stops answering at once and nothing is wrong with any of the stations in it.