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

Francis Xavier Holden wrote:

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

Don't know about successful or not but there are too many stations for the
available bandwidth so the data rate is the lowest in Europe and hence the
quality is, in general, crap.

Ian

I agree with Ian the quality is poor on many pop stations, but is ok on the
classic music stations.
The best I have seen is BBC Radio 3 192Kbs then Classic FM at 160Kbs and the
worst was a pop commercial station at 64 Kbs, this is using a DAB tuner.

This should not be a problem in the long term if the price of DAB equipment is
kept high, as we all know the vast majority of people will not pay large amounts
of money for music equipment, why pay £100 for a radio when you can get one for
£10, and with only a small user base the commercial stations will not see a
benefit in paying for a DAB licence as well as FM / AM so in time will leave if
we are lucky.

whiteflyer




"Ian Bell" wrote in message
...
Francis Xavier Holden wrote:

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

Don't know about successful or not but there are too many stations for the
available bandwidth so the data rate is the lowest in Europe and hence the
quality is, in general, crap.

Ian

On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 08:58:16 +0100, "Whiteflyer"
wrote:

I agree with Ian the quality is poor on many pop stations, but is ok on the
classic music stations.
The best I have seen is BBC Radio 3 192Kbs then Classic FM at 160Kbs and the
worst was a pop commercial station at 64 Kbs, this is using a DAB tuner.

This should not be a problem in the long term if the price of DAB equipment is
kept high, as we all know the vast majority of people will not pay large amounts
of money for music equipment, why pay £100 for a radio when you can get one for
£10, and with only a small user base the commercial stations will not see a
benefit in paying for a DAB licence as well as FM / AM so in time will leave if
we are lucky.

whiteflyer



If you want to know just how bad DAB can be, listen to Sunrise radio.
I guarantee you won't do it for long. It is on a multiplex run by
Capital radio, and I'm pretty sure they've *never* listened to it.

d

--
http://www.pearce.uk.com

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