There are a number of different flavors of Liquidcompass players – a standard flash player, custom players, a few still probably using their older player…
Salem’s player is generally very fast – IF- it doesn’t load a streaming video ad at startup.
Going to KSKY-AM
The stream started being received at the player in 9 seconds.
It began by loading about 10 pieces of javascript concurrently – with no lag in offering them up. The javascript loaded up a 113k Flash app, which then loaded up about 10 more tiny pieces of flash in parallel – very good strategy. AFTER the stream started playing in continued to load some other javascript and facebook related stuff.
Along the way, it talked with Facebook, DoubleClick, 2mdn (google), and andomedia (Ando Media does real time web ratings, but isn’t directly involved in ad targeting). since it is showing a banner ad (possibly), that’s a pretty reasonable list.
What it adds in extra “stuff”, it makes up for with very fast servers and a very smart design.
Does that match your experience?