the Scandies do seem to be moving ahead with all kind of things – can’t find it now but there was a FB post a short while ago saying why Finland was the best place in the world to live.
Time to buy a bigger coat?
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Moose the Mooche says
I’m away for 24 hours and return to discover than nearly ten minutes passed without anybody mentioning Scandinavia.
Slandards are stipping.
pencilsqueezer says
I have a half eaten packet of Ryvita in my kitchen cupboard.
Does this help?
fitterstoke says
Hi @ Mr H – your comment seems to imply that DAB is better than FM. That hasn’t been my own experience, certainly not regarding sound quality. “Never mind the quality, feel the width”‘ again….
John Walters says
Have to agree with Mr. Fitterstoke. Remember when DAB radio was first introduced ? ( 15 years ago ? ) It was supposed to have a far superior sound quality over the FM signal.
Nothing could be further from the truth. A real case of “The Emperors New Clothes”.
One advantage……….It is so much better listening to sport on 5 live than on the am waveband.
fitterstoke says
Exactly – a great replacement for long & medium wave on AM, but no comparison with even average quality FM…
JQW says
DAB was originally designed as a means to broadcast digital radio using the CD PCM standard of 44.1/16. Then someone decided to add lossy data compression to it to allow more stations to be squeezed in, and that’s when the rot set it.
fitterstoke says
Hence, “never mind the quality….” comment above. Applies to TV too….
Junior Wells says
A few problems – doesn’t appear you can get weak signal but still listenable. Either get it or don’t.
Listening at a live game doesn’t work due to the slight delay.
Just spent a long drive through central Australia. No phone or internet reception for over 2 days. Cant see it happening down here anytime soon.
Carl says
For me, living in North London, DAB has the advantage that I can listen to something on DAB on BBC Radios 2 & 4 without having pirate stations imposing themselves over the BBC signal.
Carolina says
I heard a feature on the Norway switch on radio 4 and that we are not forecast to pass the threshold of the required amount of digital listenership for switching to digital till 2020. That is way too soon for me and I hope public opinion here keeps delaying and delaying it. I have a nice Roberts digital set in the kitchen but it is heavy and I haven’t found a reasonably sounding portable set I could carry about. The good ones are too heavy and little ones sound very tinny. My 16 yr old Sony portable radio sounds really good and is a manageable weight for me. It finally wore out and I just bought two replacements off ebay so will be very narked if they change any time soon.
Junior Wells says
how does one wear them out , or did something break?
Carolina says
Well, it started to turn itself off randomly and lose all the clock and tuning information. Still it had been dropped on the floor by me so many times over the years something had probably broken!
Junior Wells says
Yep that’s broken all right.
dai says
DAB doesn’t’ exist over here, so FM is unlikely to disappear. We do have satellite radio which requires a subscription (then most channels have no commercials), but allows me to listen to eg BBC World Service in the car including live football broadcasts etc. Quality is not as good as FM though (but better than AM).
Mike_H says
Yep DAB is an inherently worse format for audio than FM. My favourite ROIO torrenting site used to ban DAB-origin recordings as part of their refusal to handle lossy recordings in general. These days they are a bit more relaxed. but not totally.
There again a lot of FM pop music stations (including some at the BBC) monkey around with the audio anyway to give it more “oomph” on inferior equipment. Personally, I’d rather have a clear but lossy DAB signal than a hissy FM signal, as I have had in the past in some locations.
I’d like to have the choice though.
My car audio equipment is not upgradeable to DAB, being manufacturer-specific and coded into the car electronic systems. I would have to get a separate DAB unit and connect it direct to the Aux input or via Bluetooth to Aux.
When at home, my radio listening is always online.
In my old car, which had no Aux input, I used to use an FM transmitter dongle for my iPod. It was very hard to find vacant channels to tune it to. Completely impossible anywhere near Slough, where South Asian pirate stations are in their hundreds.
I don’t know if this is still the case, but early portable DAB radios used to eat batteries at about 4 times the rate of comparable FM sets.
Locust says
I haven’t heard much about DAB here in Sweden in a long time, so I read up on it on Wiki out of curiosity. It was quite badly written, so I’m still not sure how we’re standing on the issue…but I think it may have said that the current goverment isn’t going forward with the previous plans to switch from FM to DAB.
Not that I care…I only ever listen to the radio on my computer.
Vincent says
“Swedish”. COR!!!
fentonsteve says
I was in and around the BBC at the time DAB was proposed. There are a lot of theoretical benefits – cd-quality, single frequency networks, reduced transmission power, more robust reception. Then some twunt in the marketing department decided they’d rather have 100 channels broadcasting Mpeg encoding at 96kbps. The same thing happened in the TV arm, which is why Freeview pictures are so dire (I’ll save that rant for another day)
The good news is by the time the UK switches off FM, everything will be broadcast in DAB+ (which is AAC instead of MP3). The bad news is old DAB sets won’t be able to decode DAB+ transmissions.
The best quality BBC broadcasts are the 320kbps AAC web transmission of the national networks, which is pretty near CD quality, but you need a computer to “tune in”.
FM isn’t CD quality, either, as the FM transmitters are fed by 14-bit lossy NICAM encoders via the TV transmission network.
Let me know if you want me to bore some more, I have plenty more where that came from.
minibreakfast says
Do you know how long until DAB+ happens? Our solar powered rechargeable DAB is getting on and the battery doesn’t hold much of a charge these days, and I’m now wondering whether to hold off replacing it.
fentonsteve says
The latest UK commercial multiplex already carries DAB+ stations. All recent (2 or 3 years) DAB radios will already do DAB+. Look for the green tick.
Many existing sets (e.g. old Pure models) can be upgraded to DAB+ with a software update.
minibreakfast says
Ah, thanks. Mine’s a Roberts, probably ten years old. I’d not heard of DAB+ before now.
I’ve mentioned this before, but something about our local transmitter (Aldeburgh) means we can only get BBC stations on DAB, and even then it’s patchy. I don’t suppose this will change with the new version.
fentonsteve says
DAB+ has been around since shortly after the UK started broadcasting in DAB. Most of the European continent (including Norway) saw the light and rolled out DAB+ transmissions from the off, so most sets sold in UK/Eu are designed to receive both.
Pure radio owners might like to refer to (and possibly weep)
http://www.pure.com/digital-radio/dab/dab-plus-compatibility
I have the sites bookmarked somewhere for the 320k AAC BBC live streams if anybody is interested.
DogFacedBoy says
My latest work van has a DAB radio so I’ve been able to listen to 5 Live (when not doing sport) clearly as well as BBC 6Music. Chuck in classic and not so classic comedy and drama on 4Extra my chock full mp3 player can go a while without being used.
So DFB likes DAB but it’s not that widespread as portable audio so fabulous FM will live on