"David Looser" wrote in message

"BBC is biased towards DAB" wrote in message
...
"David Looser" wrote in message

"BBC is biased towards DAB" wrote in message
...

I can't say I've listened to every single listen again programme
available,

You couldn't, unless you are capable of listening to many
programmes at
the same time 24 hours a day.


Gosh, how do you come out with such clever comebacks?

Well don't say daft things about not having heard every single
listen
again programme then!


If you re-read what I said, I think you'll find it was a perfectly
reasonable thing to say.


but yes, the quality of the listen again programmes I've listened
to
recently have been significantly better quality than on DAB.


Well don't listen to DAB then.


That's missing the point though, because the rest of the general
public
are being forcefully pushed towards DAB

Are they?, can't say I've noticed.


Get a TV set then. They happen to advertise DAB on TV a fair bit.


even though for millions of people the Internet or even digital TV
woudl
be a better platform for what they want.

Which is probably why the BBC offers those as well.


?


Also, because the BBC is so biased towards DAB and DAB offers crap
quality it's trying to keep the quality down on other platforms.
Basically, everything revolves around DAB. If they provided the
best
quality they could on other platforms and acknowledged taht there
are
problems with DAB's audio quality then I wouldn't mind.

Gosh, this is turning into a real conspiracy theory!


There's a hell of a lot of evidence that indicates that the BBC is
highly biased towards DAB and against the Internet streams (far and
away, they're mostly biased against the live streams rather than teh
on-demadn streams on the iPlayer, because they see that as being
complementary to some degree, whereas live is a competitor to DAB).

21 TV ad campaigns for DAB and zero TV ad campaigns for Internet radio
for starters.


Analogue radio will be with us for the
forseeable future, and most radio stations are now available as an
internet stream. So why get so excercised over DAB?


See above.


So, what are you listening to?

Yesterday's "Any Questions". Curiously I often notice the
distortion is
most noticable on the voices of the continuity announcers.


Yes, I have actually heard R4's listen again streams are screwed up
at
the moment.

Have you?, or did you just make that bit up?


Firstly, I had already heard the problems with the speech on R4 listen
again, and secondly someone else posted about this on
alt.radio.digital as well:

"They don't
sound nearly as good as 128kbps mp3 should. I don't know if this is
universal, or just on some programmes - the problem has been on all
the Radio 4 programmes I've tried over the last few months.

e.g. listen to the announcer during the first 40 seconds of this...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00h62xq/Afternoon_Play_The_Foresters_Daughter/"

So, no, I didn't make it up.


That's a temporary problem though, not an inherent problem.

Nonesense! the quality today is just the same as it's been for
months
(which is rather better than it was before).


Absolute rubbish. This is a new problem. The on-demand streams only
started using the long-awaited new encoders a couple of months ago,
which you won't even be aware of, so to suggest that the quality has
been the same as it is now for thet last few months is completely
wrong. Did you just make that up?


R4's listen again streams use 128 kbps MP3, whereas R4 on DAB uses
128
kbps MP2. And MP3 is a far better codec to use at 128 kbps than MP2
is,
that's for sure.

To be fair, speech on DAB isn't the main problem. The main problem
is
music.

BTW, the BBC's live and listen again streams should be moving over
to
using AAC/AAC+ over the next week or two (if you're not aware,
AAC/AAC+
is an excellent codec). And the bit rates should increase over
time,
because Internet bandwidth costs are plummetting.

I'm glad to hear it.

Stick to DAB if you like, but you'd be sticking with the lowest
quality
digital platform.

You mistake. I am not "sticking with DAB", I rarely listen to it.


You have actually been continually sticking up for DAB's audio quality
in this thread as a whole.



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

The adoption of DAB was the most incompetent technical
decision ever made in the history of UK broadcasting:
http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/da...ion_of_dab.htm