Radio streams are encoded (compressed) to a ‘bitrate’. The bitrate simply refers to the audio quality of the stream, this is measured in computer terms in ‘kbps – kilo bits per second’ or ‘k’ for short. As a rough guide; listening to a station in 128k stereo would sound like CD quality, where as 24k would sound more like listening over the phone. It is also important to note that users with a dial-up internet connection will not be able to connect to anything higher than 24k.