Don Pearce wrote in message news:49951dcb.337776187@localhost
On Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:53:27 GMT, Rob
wrote:

Don Pearce wrote:
On Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:13:22 +0000 (GMT), "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:

In article ,
BBC is biased towards DAB wrote:
I see you've snipped what I was responding to, so here's what
Plowman
said:
"BTW - I've never heard a decent DAB radio sound as bad as MW."
So I was saying that Kerrang on DAB sounds as bad as MW.
Nice to see your logic is as always.

But if you take just one parameter, Kerrang on DAB is plainly
transmitting higher frequencies than you'll get off any AM
broadcast.
If you can't hear that it explains a lot.

OK this needs to be settled. I've recorded 10 seconds of Kerrang
from
DAB, followed by 10 seconds of a MW pop station, both from decent
tuners. As far as I am concerned there is no contest - DAB wins
hands
down. Van Gogh would have heard the difference.

The DAB goes to 12kHz, the mw is dying by 4kHz.

http://81.174.169.10/odds/dab_mw.mp3

d

That's interesting, thanks for taking the trouble.

FWIW I much prefer the MW (second) part from that extract from what
little music I can hear - the DAB sounds as if it's coming from an
echo
chamber, bass turned down, treble turned right up, tinny. The MW
sounds
focussed, muffled, treble turned right down, artificially bassy,
sonorous.

I buy on average a DAB radio each year, thinking I might like
it/what's
not to like. Then within a month or so I sell it or give it away,
and go
back to one of the cheap portable FM radios I have.

Perhaps FM masks the compression, perhaps blind prejudice, perhaps
FM
does 'sound better'.

Rob

The DAB actually has more bass than the MW, although they both
bottom
out at 42Hz (low E on the bass guitar). The MW has more level in the
mid-lows 100 to 500Hz, which gives a perception of warmth. That is
what you are hearing. The MW is exactly what my mother would have
described as mellow years ago.

My DAB radio lives by the bed, where it wakes me up and lets me hear
the occasional BBC7 programme late at night. The mw radio lives in
the kitchen - where it belongs (only I never use mw, just fm). All
serious listening is courtesy of Freeview.


Is your serious listening going to be via Freeview when the BBC's
Internet streams provide higher quality?




--
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