DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
| "Alan" <junk@admac.myzen.co.uk> wrote in message
| news:AtSTnMGj7pQKFwgC@amac.f2s.com
|| In message <7afjm6F1vb133U1@mid.individual.net>, DAB sounds worse
|| than
|| FM <dab.is@fooked.com> wrote
||| There's a 10 Downing St petition to stop FM/AM being switched off:
|||
||| http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/AM-FM-Radio/
|||
||| Please sign. Thanks.
|||
|||
||
||
|| Why would anyone want to sign something that may prevent us getting
|| hundreds of radio stations on DAB?
|
|
| What you say is wrong for the following reasons:
|
| * The Digital Britain report said that the FM band would be used for
| "ultra-local" FM stations once all of the bigger FM radio stations
| have been switched off. So FM actually isn't planned to be switched
| off, so the FM band couldn't be freed up for DAB anyway
|
| * DAB uses frequencies of around 200 MHz, whereas FM uses
| frequencies of around 100 MHz - i.e. DAB couldn't be transmitted in
| the FM band anyway
|
| * DAB won't be getting any more spectrum than it's already got,
| because DAB spectrum was all allocated to Europeam countries in 2006
| (there is one unused DAB channel at the moment that was going to be
| used for a 2nd national commercial multiplex which fell through when
| Channel 4 decided against entering radio last year, but I think
| that's just going to be pretty much wasted when they replan the
| spectrum)
|
| * Apart from in London, where I think the figure is around 55
| stations, people can typically receive about 35 radio stations on
| DAB. DAB could never carry hundreds of radio stations. DAB was
| designed in the 1980s. It is an incredibly inefficient system
| because the technologies it uses are so old.
|
| Some other things that you might like to bear in mind which it
| sounds like you're probably unaware of at the moment are that
|
| * DAB provides lower audio quality than FM, Internet radio and radio
| via digital TV
|
| * DAB's audio quality isn't going to get any better in future
| because the MP2 audio codec it uses is 20 years old so they've
| obviously been optimising it for years but it still sounds crap at
| the low bit rates that it's used at in the UK
|
| * DAB's audio quality is actually only likely to go down, because as
| more people get DAB then that makes it more appealing to commercial
| radio stations to launch new stations because there's more potential
| revenue. The downside of that is that the bit rate levels of
| existing stations have to be reduced to fit new stations in, so the
| audio quality goes down as a result
|
| * 98% of stereo stations on DAB in the UK use a bit rate of either
| 112 or 128 kbps with the MP2 codec - in comparison, the BBC uses a
| bit rate of 256 kbps MP2 for the audio on its TV channels, and the
| vast majority of TV channels tend to use a bit rate of 192 kbps MP2
| for the audio. Basically, the UK radio broadcasters are using bit
| rates that the MP2 audio codec wasn't designed to be used at.
|
| * One thing that might surprise quite a few people is that the
| digital platform that carries digital radio at the highest audio
| quality is now the Internet, because the BBC launched new 128 kbps
| AAC live streams for the stereo stations apart from Radio 3 and 192
| kbps AAC for Radio 3 last week - 128 kbps AAC is the equivalent of
| around 224 kbps MP2, so it's far higher quality than 128 kbps MP2
| that the BBC uses on DAB. Also most of the bigger commercial radio
| stations also provide far higher qulaity online streams than they
| provide on DAB. And the audio quality on Internet radio's only
| likely to increase over time as Internet speeds get faster and cost
| per Mbps falls.
|
| * If you actually do want hundreds of radio stations there are over
| 10,000 Internet radio stations, so DAB obviously can't compete with
| that
|
| * DAB cannot deliver on-demand content - only broadband (and cable)
| can deliver true on-demand streams
|
| So if you were thinking that DAB's going to turn into a good digital
| radio system, I'm afraid it's basically just FM done digitally but
| at lower audio quality and you get a few more stations. If you have
| shit FM reception then you'd benefit, otherwise you'll actually get
| lower audio quality on DAB than on FM.
|
| The reason why DAB is being backed by the government is because it's
| to bail out the commercial radio groups who don't want to pay to
| transmit both analogue and digital for the next few decades - DAB
| was just a few years from failing, because sales have been really
| shit since 2006 (that's why DAB nearly collapsed last year when
| GCap Media said it wanted to withdraw from DAB completely). The
| BBC's Director of Radio Tim Davie said recently that at the rate
| we're going FM wouldn't be switched off "in our lifetime", which is
| correct, because it's only selling at 2 millino per year with 6%
| growth last year (which is shit) and basically it would have taken
| about 30 - 40 years to switch FM off, so we have to all be forced
| to get DAB like good little citizens to bail out the commercial
| radio groups so that they don't have to pay dual analogue and
| digital transmission costs.
|
| The radio broadcasters also have another reason why they want
| everyone to listen via DAB, which is that it's the platform where
| their stations face the least amount of competition - so they'd
| lose the least amount of listeners and hence revenue - whereas if
| Internet radio became popular they're scared that people would
| desert their stations and listen to others, and they can't allow
| that, and neither can the government. It's just pure protectionism,
| basically.

I doff my cap to your superior knowledge on this subject and shall
withdraw from the argument.