Quote:
Originally Posted by Rillington
On that point, from what people remember, were the analogue cable services offering stereo sound before terrestrial which started on the BBC in 1991.
What I do remember is that Bell Cablemedia offered a radio service, and this included FM feeds for the music channels, Sky Movies and Sky Sports 1. It also featured 5 Live and the other BBC and independent stations available in the area at the time a few megahertz higher than the actual frequency. The signal was plugged into the back of your hifi. I presume other cable companies also offered this.
I presume that satellite equipment was stereo compatable from day one.
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The FM radio feeds were obtained from local FM broadcasts, hence the channel shift to a higher or lower frequency to avoid possible interference. MTV/Sky Movies/Movie Channel feeds were taken from analogue satellite sound subcarriers. When NICAM stereo TV services were introduced, the BBC/ITV/C4 terrestrial services could easily be transposed to the cable output frequencies. For the other satellite derived channels cable companies started fitting NICAM encoders to their headend modulators, again using the satellite sound subcarriers to source the stereo audio. I remember making several complaints in the early days of the NICAM services, as the engineers were sometimes a bit sloppy wiring up the encoders & would get the left & right channels the wrong way round.