DAB HiFi ???

ioscorpio

As some of you have said that the quality of sound is not great from DAB radios, but Freeview DAB radio is good, how does a HiFi with Dab radio compare?

fwor

Although some DAB radios are let down by poor quality amplifiers and/or speakers, there is a more fundamental problem with DAB: when the radio spectrum was allocated, too little bandwidth was assigned for each channel. This means that a relatively low bit-rate can be used, and some stations use even lower rates than the max allowed and also use a lot of "compression" (artificially reducing the differences in volume within a track).

Increasing the quality of the HiFi components cannot undo these fundamental constraints.

Freeview digital radio (which is ~not~ called DAB) is not so heavily bandwidth constrained.

Having said the above, if you're not an "audiophile", you may not notice the difference!

buglawton

Funny thing is, BBC Radio 7 is stereo on Freeview but mono on DAB!

Quasar

I have a Sony DAB HiFi. The tuner sound is truly amazing. Find the best position for the aerial (a long cable thingy in my case) and you will hear not one ripple of background noise, and the sound as clear as you could possibly wish.

CHR15

I find that to be the biggest problem with DAB, the aerial!

It is almost impossible to just throw the aerial out the back and get a signal. It can take ages to get Just the right position. Think of the comedy sketches with someone balancing on one leg to get a TV picture for the football.

It's the same with DAB. You may be lucky but I never have been. I find it worse than standard FM.

Quasar

CHR15 wrote: »

I find that to be the biggest problem with DAB, the aerial!

It is almost impossible to just throw the aerial out the back and get a signal. It can take ages to get Just the right position. Think of the comedy sketches with someone balancing on one leg to get a TV picture for the football.

It's the same with DAB. You may be lucky but I never have been. I find it worse than standard FM.

I admit that often it does take a bit of adjusting - I had to do just that about 15 minutes ago - but I find that I need only a bit of shuffling now that I have found a general working direction for it.

isofa

Have a top end DAB tuner on our separates system, when it gets a signal it is fantastic quality, infinitely better than FM. The trouble is, usual after 30 mins to 1 hour the signal obviously gets bad and it just drops out and that's it. So end up using FM still.

We have a separate FM aerial in the loft, which the FM and DAB tuner is connected to, but it's just a thin pipe type rather than a proper digital FM aerial. Mind you, we also just have a standard TV aerial, but we get all the freeview channels and excellent signal no problem at all...