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Betty Neyhart
It won't happen in the short to medium term. Too many small stations can't afford to go onto DAB and the multiplex transmission areas don't match their own MSA's. I know of one radio station that was offered space on a mux that if they'd had accepted would be broadcasting to just 30% of their own "area" but to a massive area they didn't broadcast to. Made no sense let alone the cost which was many times more expensive than their FM setup.
I might even suggest the BBC may be pushed into taking stations off of FM first to pave the way and make life easier for the commercials. This is essentially happened when the BBC had to vacate it's MW frequencies. Although ironically the vacated frequencies were sold off to commercial stations (Virgin and Talk Sport) with 1 set of frequencies being reserved for Radio 5.
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No. It can't sound better. The codecs used in DAB introduce non-harmonic distortion into an audio signal. For music, this is ghastly. Far worse than hiss and crackle, far worse than mere harmonic distortion.
So I don't really know anything about (or hear) DAB. But... My observation from digital TV is that the broadcasters want to squeeze more 'stations' (broadcasts) into a single channel, in order to maximize revenue, commercials I assume. So now the expensive 1080P TV doesn't get many stations higher than 720, and when I was watching one station and they showed a flock of birds taking off, the whole screen became blocky and pixellated, presumably because the compression algorithm couldn't handle the high rate of changed data caused by all the movement. Same thing with sports scenes or other action scenes. It sucks.
And every time I turn off the switch to the fluorescent light, I lose a half second of audio and video. I long for the days when all you'd see was a glitch on the screen and (probably not even) a click in the sound. I wonder if DAB is going to suffer the same vulnerability. In which case, I think it should stay away from the U.S.
What could be worse is if HPN or ethernet over the power lines starts to interfere with the DAB signals. Or if the 'white space' digital signals start getting too close to the DAB signals. Stuff happens...
I have a couple of DAB radios and several FM. I listen for hours to the FM and find it is easy on the ear. I listen to the same programs on DAB and the over compression and poor quality actually make it fatiguing to listen to. You should be listening to the program (FM) not noticing the compression/artifacts/noise that it is making (DAB). There is plenty of unused space on the FM band that could host some more of the "desirable" channels at decent quality (leaving DAB still there as a choice - I'm not saying ditch it) but no one seems to want to do that when there is a quick buck to be made by flogging off the FM frequency band and as someone else has pointed out, when you have designed lots of nice digital DAB gardware you can lobby for that sale, dangling carrots of financial windfalls right left and centre to our elected elite.
Without straying onto the topic of internet radio, I like my DAB radios and anecdotally I think most of the radio listening public feel either neutral or positive towards it. In fact given the choice between 10 stations on FM, 50 on DAB I know which one will give me more content I want to listen to. My kitchen radio? DAB. Garage? DAB. My car? See below..
The only way to increase uptake further is to put more effort into getting DAB sets installed and working in cars. I had a horrendous mini countryman courtesy car last month, the only saving grace being an excellent DAB radio - why has it taken until 2012 for vehicle manufacturers to to even install them alongside FM??
Anyway - the Reg, you've been forecasting the death of DAB for a decade like some crazed FM-Shareholder. Maybe after all this time you should pop out and buy a set and maybe, just maybe it might not be as bad as you thought.
DAB sets are expensive and don't last long on batteries. I've got a Sony world radio that runs on 4 'AA' cells for about two weeks of fairly intensive FM listening. Is there any DAB radio that can come close to that sort of performance? No, thought not. DAB sets are almost all confined to mains operation because battery life is so poor.
My current cost estimate for replacing all my radios is in the region of 250 if you include replacing the car radio. I can't buy a single DAB adaptor like I could for the TV, and I have no reason to go and spend this money on radios other than the government forcing me to.
The Roberts DAB I have runs very happily for about 4 days of intensive listening on rechargable AAs, Personally I got DAB because I value the wider variety of stations - 6 Music and 4 Extra in particular. I also nipped down to Halfords and got one for the car.
When I've had DAB in a car its been great. I have no problem with in car DAB. After all there is a nice big 12V lead acid battery and loads of spare power from the alternator to power all those extra transistors, plus the ability to have an external aerial with a nice big ground-plane making reception of the signal easy.
Where I do have a problem with is on my portable radio inside my house. The aerial on my portable radio isn't as good as a car aerial, and the brick walls of the house get in the way of the signal. This is down to the propogation of 200 -> 300 MHz signals not being anywhere near as good in a house as a 100 MHz FM signal. Reception of DAB in my house is crap. I have to have the frickin' receiver near a window to stop it losing the signal. Then there is the issue of powering up all those extra frickin transistors. The AA batteries in my nice little cheap FM radio last for WEEKS. In a DAB radio I have to have it plugged into the mains because I can't afford its appetite for batteries.
Personally, I'm not a big radio listener so have no "bias" either way. But DAB doesn't receive where I drive. It means replacing every radio I own. It also means that signals exhibit the same as digital TV signals when the power is weak - artifacts that you can't compensate for rather than a slight static / loss of volume as on FM. Not only that, but the WORST thing that ever happened to UK TV was when we went from 5 channels to 100's. Reason: The advertising revenue dive-bombed and so did the quality. There's a reason Saturday night TV died, when it was the staple for decades. There's a reason that channels are full of "cheap" repeats. There's a reason that advert breaks are twice as long as they were when I was a kid. Putting 50 DAB channels when there's only X amount of channels bothering to take an FM licence means two things - the big channels die and the small, junky, new, channels take over to get their 0.1% of the audience in their place.
The reason vehicle manufacturer's don't install it is because people won't pay for it. I'd rather have no radio at all (literally - same as me giving up my TV for several years when the digital switchover happened and barely noticing - I only have one now because it's "free" with my phone/broadband).
The death of DAB is not when there are zero DAB channels. It's when people don't buy into it. There are lots of Thunderbolt-interconnection products out there. It doesn't mean that it's dead, but it also doesn't mean that it'll rule the world.
When you take into account the "Oh, your Freeview needs another upgrade" DVB-T2 debacle, then it's inevitable that people are loathe to jump into DAB especially when there's been talk of codec upgrades and DAB2 for a long time now. And that will mean changing all your hardware again. Freeview etc. could piggy-back on the fortunately-timed fad for large, flatscreen TV's on walls taking over from thick, bulbous CRT's on a TV cabinet. DAB doesn't have any such thing. "HD Audio"? I couldn't tell when my laptop advertised 96Kb/s audio 10 years ago, why would I care now?
DAB isn't dead, but it's never really got a good start in life and won't be going far without being FORCED as a standard. And it's just as likely that people abandon radio entirely in that case, rather than move on. It's a risk that the major stations don't want to take because they know it probably won't go their way. They may be FORCED to at some point but if you have to force people onto a technology, rather than letting market forces play out, then you know that it's doomed.
If FM turned off tomorrow, I wouldn't be buying a DAB radio. At all. Probably forever. I'm a geek, and I have multiple dual-tuner TV cards from both analog and digital eras, just "because" it then gives me an adaptor to view that content if I ever need it. In comparison I have an FM radio in the car, one on my phone, one in the shed, one in the kitchen, etc. - which of those would I DAB if they turned off? None of them. I'd just stop using them. I wouldn't even bother to go to the effort of binning them.
If DAB were just a digitisation of radio that could be implemented on a simple circuit, they'd already be implemented. It would be like LW/MW/FM transitions - just switch to digital audio and have the same channels. The fact it that it requires a lot of upgrades and a lot of junk and a lot of frequency allocation and provides poorer overall service when you consider ALL current users of FM. And all the "selling points" aren't - sending additional data and even images over DAB is a waste of time in the Internet era.
Fact is, DAB is streaming audio over 3G (maybe not specifically, but that's basically what it is) but without any significantly useful buffering. If I want that, I have that elsewhere but done a lot better (sometimes on my existing devices, e.g. smartphone).
DAB isn't dead, but it's a dead-end. It might be forced into the market and enjoy a small resurgence but DAB2 will be the decider - death of all DAB or obsoletion of the existing DAB. When you have found out which, come back and tell me so I can look at buying it then.
Perhaps someone will come up with a converter box that rebroadcasts a single channel on a FM frequency, over an area of a few tens or so square meters. Then the old FM radios will be able to receive any one of the DAB channels. Something like a mobile hot spot for FM radios. And if they wanted to add a feature, they could decode the online radio stations and rebroadcast one of them, too. It will probably put a dent in DAB set sales, so the manufacturers will probably oppose it.
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