Summary

A measurable portion of your listening audience will have no interest in all the work you've done to make your streaming audio sound as good as possible. But they will know whether they like the way it sounds. This is true in the terrestrial broadcast world as well. A little bit of extra work can make a big difference to the quality of your streams, especially at low bit rates. You might not win awards for the superior quality of your streaming audio, but no news can be very good news! People will continue to tune in to a better sounding stream, especially when compared to streams that haven't been optimized. Of course, there's no substitute for compelling programming.