Techno stations here range from the Detroit and Berlin end, sparse, mechanical and built on repetition, through to hardstyle and hardcore channels operating at much higher tempos and much higher aggression. The tag does not distinguish between them, so tempo is the useful signal: classic techno sits around 125 to 135 BPM, hardstyle runs 150 and up.
Minimal, which has its own tag in this directory, is the deliberately reduced end of techno: few elements, long unchanging passages, changes measured in minutes rather than bars. It is the most divisive format here. For focused work it is arguably the best thing in the entire directory, because it offers rhythm with almost no event structure to distract you.
Because techno is synthetic, it encodes more cleanly than acoustic music at the same bitrate, with the usual exception of sub-bass. The sharp transient of a closed hi-hat is the other thing that suffers; at low bitrates it smears into a soft click, which flattens the rhythmic precision the genre depends on.
