Classic Vinyl HD

The United States' dial as this directory has it starts with Classic Vinyl HD. Nothing about that ranking is editorial: it is the count of how often the stream has been opened, held against the 1,480 other stations in the United States with pages on this site.

With 769 opens recorded, this is one of the directory's heavily played streams. That is the strongest thing the public data says about any station, and it is still a measure of traffic through one directory rather than of audience.

Only two entries in the United States put 1930 first. The tag is self-declared and inconsistent between countries, which is why the rail below is worth more as a way of wandering than as a filter.

At 320 kbps, Classic Vinyl HD streams at more than double the United States' 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 stream address on this entry points at icecast.walmradio.com:8443, which is where 10 other stations in the United States are served from as well. Platforms of that size carry the long tail of a country's dial, and they are the reason a listing can look broken when it is one host having a quiet hour.

Of everything the directory lists in United States, the entry this page reads closest to is Classic Vinyl HD Opus, so it is worth setting out what separates the two. This one is encoded as MP3 and that one as OGG, which is a difference a browser can hear about before you can. The directory puts this stream at three hundred and twenty kilobits and the other at one hundred and ninety-two.