Woody wrote:

The only thing is that there are people who want a small radio on
which to listen to stations that are otherwise unavailable to them
like 5 Sport, BBC7, JazzFM, etc.

For speech based progs its is more than acceptable in my opinion. I
bought one as an early birthday present for SWMBO and it is the first
in many years which she has not only accepted without complaint but
positively enjoys!!


That's great, but don't forget that there's more to radio than small
mono portable radios.

Basically though, the problem with DAB in the UK is that the Radio
Authority (now under Ofcom) set the minimum bit rates for stereo music
stations to be 128kbps, and now 98% of all stereo stations in the UK are
128kbps. 128kbps may well be okay for a small portable radio, but DAB
was originally designed to provide CD-quality (look at ANY research
paper from the early days (late 80s early 90s) of DAB development and
the main reason for it being developed was to provide high audio
quality)

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

Now we've got 5 extra BBC stations and Radios 1, 2, 4, 6 Music and 1Xtra
using 128kbps, which has been officially classified as providing
"Annoying" audio quality:

http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/bi...vs_quality.htm

Also, we have the commercial radio groups all using 128kbps for music
stations, despite the fact that there's lots of spare capacity on the
commercial DAB multiplexes:

http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/wa...x_capacity.htm

But anyway, thanks for letting me know that your wife loves DAB. I'm
sure the rest of the nation will be thrilled by the fact that your wife
likes BBC7 yet they're listening to their favourite 128kbps music
station at a significantly lower audio quality than on FM.

Well, to be honest, Joe Averge will just fall for the DAB hype and
*believe* that DAB is better, even though it's actually worse.

Oh, and BTW, the UK has the lowest audio quality on DAB in the entire
world, see:

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

but that's alright, because your wife can get Radio 5 Sports Extra....


--
Steve - www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - Digital Radio News & Info

DAB sounds worse than FM, Freeview, digital satellite, cable and
broadband internet radio