In article , Francis Xavier
Holden writes
There was a two page piece on Digital Radio in the Melbourne AGE Green
Guide last week promising all sorts of wonders.

I did notice a distinct lack of comment about anything that looked
like quality content.

I seem to recall that Digital radio has been less than a runaway
success in UK.

Anyone got any comments or info from UK.
..
F X Holden

Well terrestrial DAB is a very poor relation of what It could've been.
The bit rates have been dropped to allow for more user "choice" and
audio quality has been very severely compromised. In no way could
anything under 192 K/bits be described as good quality, that's any
better than existing FM services.

Sorry but digital is not a word I associate with quality anymore
especially in the broadcast field. Very often radio stations compound
the poor bitrates by a horror called transcoding where a CD will be
ripped onto a hard disk (computer) playout system, at a lower bit rate,
this will then be crammed down a low bitrate line and then "processed"
to make the whole thing much worse.

You might like to take a look at

http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/

This site is written by Steve Green who has an almost evangelical
conviction about DAB quality and has proved to be a right pain in the
arse for DAB broadcasters. There is a reference to an article in the UK
Sunday Times which is very critical of DAB "sound" with some research
works conducted by Dr David Robinson and Academic from the university of
Essex IIRC.

Shame really, this could have been a world class service and it was
conceived as such but now it makes broadcasters like even the BBC seems
not to give a damn about what they transmit with the exception of the
classic channel Radio 3 but there will come a time when that will be
reduced to 128 K, just give it time.

Its not been anything like a commercial success either, with DAB radio
sales remaining very low....
--
Tony Sayer