A DAB Debate

Archived from the blog - Listening to Digital Radio in the UK is a waste of time and money. Early adopters who came to DAB with the launch of BBC 7 have seen a steady decline in audio quality to the point where this listener has switched off. Part of the available bandwidth has been hived off to a TV-On-Cellphones project. As a result, radio services are down to mono and cassette-quality mono at that. Innovative new stations like theJazz play music that coincided with the hi-fi boom. Forty years on, you would think a new radio purchase would be better-sounding than Sixties technology but be ready for the let-down. DAB is BAD, unless you say otherwise...

Nick Piggott Says: Part of the difficulty with DAB is that there’s far greater demand for variety of services than there is spectrum and transmission infrastructure to support it. DAB is still establishing itself as a mainstream technology, and consumers understand the proposition of increased choice of radio services; whether we approve or not, they are relatively insensitive to absolute audio quality, and it’s been proven in many markets that you can’t start a DAB market on sound quality alone.
It was a mistake to launch DAB as a quality listening proposition. DAB is still evolving, in the same way that Digital TV has evolved. Some services may evolve into high audio quality services, some services may fail and give up spectrum, some services may choose to enhance themselves in other ways given more capacity. Ultimately, consumers will decide.

Bob Ellis Says: I’ve taken some time to consider your reply and in that time my DAB usage has fallen to an hour-a-day with BBC7. You say that there is a great demand for choice. Looking at the last RAJAR, stations like Chill, Capital Life and Core are unrated, even the flagship Planet Rock only gets a reach of 1% as does my beloved BBC7. So a great choice to a few listeners. (Source RAJAR Dec 06).
Core used to be a good listen but it’s gone to mono and not even the least-worst mono quality of theJazz. The new station got me back on DAB but “the birth of the cool” coincided with the birth of the hi-fi revolution, so it’s maddening when the music I hear now sounds worse than it did in 1965. We even had stereo back then...
You did say “it was a mistake to launch DAB as a quality listening proposition.” We early-adopters took it on for the “near-CD” quality and bought very expensive kit to hear it. Modern receivers have better algorithms to get “better” sound from low bit-rates but we are still looking for a return from a £400 Arcam tuner. Try listening to BBC World Service or Core on a high-end radio...
The technology is very old; the equivalent of buying a new PC and finding it has Windows 95 on it. I won’t be upgrading my DAB radio until AAC+ comes in but I feel I’ve already made my investment and I expect a reasonable minimum standard for sound quality. It’s a shame the market will drive these lowest-common-denominator standards and the present benchmark says a lot about how the industry regards the early-adopters who gave you a market in the first place.
The broadcasters need to play their part. Some are putting bad source material on low bit-rate carriers and the result is a turn-off. Examples are OneWord, Core, Capital Life et al… It’s interesting to note that that when you made your post – for which many thanks – I had three DAB radios. Now I have a cheap portable so I have tailored my technology to what is being delivered. We’ll just ignore the £800 that was spent to learn this...