Why isn't DAB the future?

DUTR

Stoke wrote: »

We talking about DAB and DAB+ ?

DAB+ is a much improvement but only a few stations use it at the moment. Im my car DAB is not much nicer than AM but I'm in the city so get good coverage locally, at home I use my internet radio luckily my station broadcasts at192kbs :cool:

thescouselander

DAB is poor IMO. As others have said the signal is usually mono and bit rates are low. I usually stream the radio over my mobile these days which seems to yield better results.

Stoke

thescouselander wrote: »

DAB is poor IMO. As others have said the signal is usually mono and bit rates are low. I usually stream the radio over my mobile these days which seems to yield better results.

It certainly yields a performance improvement, but until 3G phone signal covers 100% it's never going to work.

And btw, yes, I put 3G, not 4G.

4G is a pipe dream for large parts of the UK.

poppasmurf_bewdley

I've gone over to DAB completely in the past couple of years.

I live in rural Worcestershire and receive a good signal both at home and in my car. I've only found a couple of spots in Kidderminster where the signal drops out for a couple of seconds or so.

Drives from here to Greater Manchester and Dorset are done without any dropouts whatsoever.

steviebabes

We are in a marginal DAB area in west Wales but with an outdoor aerial reception of the BBC channels is excellent and equal if not better than FM. I have also recently changed my car and it has DAB & FM. DAB is far superior than FM with no background hiss or noise.

Strider590

DAB radios are expensive, far too expensive for what they are, less people listen to radio and those that do often don't see the point in paying out for a DAB radio.
If they put the investment into it, DAB would be reliable across the country, but because so much money goes if paying top execs, there needs to be a far greater take up of DAB for it to pay off and that's not happening.

neilmcl

steviebabes wrote: »

We are in a marginal DAB area in west Wales but with an outdoor aerial reception of the BBC channels is excellent and equal if not better than FM. I have also recently changed my car and it has DAB & FM. DAB is far superior than FM with no background hiss or noise.

It may have a better signal but no way is DAB superior to FM in terms of audio quality.

Stoke

neilmcl wrote: »

It may have a better signal but no way is DAB superior to FM in terms of audio quality.

Only when you have strong FM though.

esuhl

Stoke wrote: »

Only when you have strong FM though.

But you need a strong signal for DAB to work too. Otherwise you get weird squelchy-sounding artefacts.

Well... you get more squelchy-sounding artefacts -- you can't avoid them with the low-quality codecs used.

Stoke

esuhl wrote: »

But you need a strong signal for DAB to work too. Otherwise you get weird squelchy-sounding artefacts.

Well... you get more squelchy-sounding artefacts -- you can't avoid them with the low-quality codecs used.

Do you need a strong signal? I'm aware there are areas of terrible coverage but I would expect a decent experience even if the signal was degraded. You can't say the same for FM.