No way he's talking about data compression, with respect. He's talking about frequency response adjustment and range compression (sometimes called "companding")

No way he's talking about data compression, with respect. He's talking about frequency response adjustment and range compression (sometimes called "companding"). A while ago NPR used to use 2B ISDN (112Kbps in the US) for remote locations. I believe they used G.722 codecs for low-latency applications (conversations) and MPEG layer II for higher quality stuff. That was data compression. But the NPR distribution system isn't so bandwidth limited as to require crushing the data.