The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

I used to listen to Team Rock on DAB - for me, the only station worth listening to on any ensemble purely for the lack of adverts, and no news or weather bollocks.

The costs of DAB transmission were so high they decided to go streaming-only back in 2016.... and this may be one of the reasons they no longer broadcast at all (either the reduced audience from dropping odd DAB, or the fact that not being able to afford a DAB licence was a sign of bigger money problems)

But out of that, Primordial Radio was born. Still streaming only, but set up by four ex-TR guys to explore better ways of getting rock and metal music to your ears. They'll never go on DAB, they swear far too much for that, but in all other respects it's a proper, professional "radio" station. Music. Presenters. Competitions. Phone-ins. Requests. NO ADVERTS. (It's really good and if you like rock and metal music, you should check it out).

The point is, these guys have been going a year and they're seemingly making a living out of it. Mobile data is not the massive expense it once was, and now most cars and homes have some sort of Bluetooth capability it's pretty simple to hit a button and hear music. I'm pretty sure a better option is to leave FM in place, turn DAB off, and if anyone wants more than FM provides then there's the internet.

The economics??

One topic that's missing from this discussion is the economics - how much does it cost the BBC and other operators to lease capacity on DAB vs. their other distribution channels? My guess is that although renting capacity on all of their options (DAB / FM / AM / DVB-T(2) / DVB-S(2) / Internet) in parallel must be eye-wateringly expensive with a combination of OFCOM Spectrum Licence fees and carrier costs, they are probably equally wary of being backed into a monopoly supplier corner - certainly given that Arqiva are now in complete control of most of the terrestrial broadcast options.

Anyone any idea how much it actually costs the BBC to broadcast on DAB vs. DVB-T vs. FM vs. their Internet bandwidth?

If a radio station (digital or analogue) has adverts interupting the program I just turn it off

49.9 per cent in the last quarter of 2017 to 50.9

But that is NOT 50.9% listening to Dab.

They conflate streaming/Internet which needs fragile instrastructure, has privacy issues and isn't broadcast.

They count DAB sets (home and car radio) even if entirely or mostly used on FM.

Where are the phones with DAB? Or DAB sets with AM for outside of local reception (esp at night?). Or the DAB sets with +200 hrs battery life (even 1939 battery radios had 24 to 240 hours run time depending on size). How many DAB portables even manage two days?

Also bit rate is too low, to save money.

RTE Irish DAB an even bigger waste than UK.

DAB & Digital Broadcast benefits National stations.

There wasn't ever to be a true Analogue Switch Over, just closure of larger FM stations and keeping smaller ones, because there is no-one for Ofcom to sell the spectrum to and DAB is too much coverage (even though it's worse for big stations) and too costly for small stations.

Norway has made a bad mistake.

Meh

I started to listen to DAB about 10 years ago and I really enjoyed it but the service failed to expand in a reasonable manner. What made it worse was when BBC Radio 6 sacked Bruce Dickinson. Bruce effin Dickinson! You don't sack the lead singer of Iron Maiden. No, no.

Ditched DAB and moved permanently to internet in 2014. I can listen to anything I want and pretty much anywhere I want.

DAB is the only thing that works reliably here

FM is almost useless, 3/4G mobile drops out if you move your heard - never mind the car.

DAB has the odd blank spot on the road, that's all, but never garbles.

DTV is messy: lost BBC4 HD in March, and it looks like the only way is an even bigger aerial.

Of course, this may be because I live in a very out of the way place called Basingstoke (someone has to)

I can *see* the local transmitter (Hannington) that FM, DAB and TV comes from.

BTW, El Reg: "FM already uses MPEG audio" (I paraphrase for brevity). WTF??

DAB is not perfect, and it's always a problem when you are an early adopter as the BBC was, but for the vast majority of current use it does seem to beat the others.

Simple answer

Sunset DAB. Give it a definite end-of-life, e.g. 5 years and shift onto something better. Frankly this should have been done a long time ago. Same now goes for MPEG2 on DVB-S/DVB-T.

Why not just use 4g systems and then that whole fequency could go

or we could just use fm

seriously..

If it aint broke dont fix it.

There's enough space to fit 6 music on fm as for the rest of the 'choice' a grand total of about 300 people will miss them and loosing it will save everyone a fortune.

Mobile listening on DAB is crap batteries only last a few hours at best whereas an old tranny can last weeks on a few D cells.

Where does DRM / DRM+ fit in to this brave new world?

Complete failure

Got two Pure radios about 10 years ago and got the kids a hi-fi's each for their rooms, could never get decent reception on DAB on any of them, even with external aerials so they generally stay turned off or tuned to FM where they work fine - in the odd case when they actually get switched on.

The whole thing is a complete failure, once again driven by commercial gain rather than what the consumer actually wants. Net result - several lost customers and two of the next generation that don't listen to the radio and instead use Spotify. OK, so we no longer get local news, but hey, thats life.

Agree with others that this should just be turned off - to make space for a better technology. IIRC, that was the whole reason why it had to happen in the first place.

Reception

My biggest gripe with DAB is reception. I live in Oxfordshire and my journey to work is a Russian roulette as to whether I can listen or not. Usually I get about 5 miles out and then it gets patchy, some days I can't even get out of my street before reception goes. Not an issue with the BBC stations, only the commercial ones. I get a better reception switching to the radio app on my phone.

I'd be really intrigued to know some demographics of the people who are commenting on this article; they all appear to be audiophiles with old radios that you could take to the South Pole for 37 years without needing replacement.

To add a very small bit of balance, I have DAB in my car and one bedroom receiver, and in these environments where I'm either concentrating on the road or trying not to wake up, they're fine; I've not felt the need to switch to FM on either of them for as long as I can remember.

In between refusing to get up and driving places, I listen to music on my Sonos speakers, where I stream radio (mainly from California: KOST 103.5 is pretty good for feel-good chart music), play digital audio files or Amazon 'Stations' depending on what mood I'm in.

So, all my music listening is "digital" in this sense, but not all of it is broadcast radio.

A couple of years ago, while on holiday in Portugal, we were walking through the village where we were staying, when we heard a burst of cheering erupt into the night, a couple of seconds later there was another, followed by yet another a few seconds later. Portugal had just scored the winner in the Euro Finals and I reckon it propagated from Terrestrial UHF to Terrestrial Digital to Satellite TV with the least lot being a good 10 or 15 seconds behind the first to know

Bah!

The reasons for the low uptake may indeed hinge on naff quality, but the acronyms are not helping.

"DAB". "DAB+". Might as well call it "LAAAAAAME".

And "RAJAR"? By the rules of naming stuff from initials it should be "RJAR" or "RaJAR" (You only get to make the "make it work" letters big if it is an awesome world-changer like RADAR.)

This whole fiasco conjures up visions of pipe-smoking, balding, middle aged men in brown tweed jackets c/w leather elbow patches sitting round a table wasting hours of time in "brainstorming" sessions.

Buying a DAB radio does not mean it still works

I have bought two DAB radios in the past. Both seriously overpriced for a radio. Both only worked if positioned very carefully. Both had poor sound quality. Both died and put in the WEEE bin.

Any digital radio I listen to comes via Freeview.

Whatever you do ...

... just don't get stuck with a license-encumbered system like HD radio (in the USA). Costs (to the broadcasters) are high and some have dropped their extended programming and gone back to analog FM.

With DAB, there are SDR receivers (some open source) available. And it wouldn't surprise me to see high end kit designed with upgradable firmware. So when you make a protocol upgrade, you just flash the receiver with a new app.

First they killed broadcast television

How true this is apparently depends on where you live, but where I live, the digital switchover of television pretty much killed broadcast TV by making it impossible for large swaths of the population to receive more than a channel or two of it at best.

I guess now that broadcast TV has been neutered, it's radio's turn.

I like DAB

No wait, I got that wrong, I meant I like the sound quality of a potato. Underwater.

In The first days of this nonsense I was still working for Auntie beeb and on loan unoffcially as a pair of golden ears was not welcome at detecting Dab every time by "ambience modulation" on classical music. String quartet= FAIL

They had Nicam which worked beautifully and I could not A/B tell because the engineering was solid, based around real research into how how we hear things and it worked.

Why was that not used in DAB Doh!

If you do not take your music viscerally then you may not get this. some bits of music have a complex interaction that gives people who are sensitive to it physical responses, the most common is a sensation of ice down the spine or just a a sudden unfocussed uplift.

We are all different, there is a chunk in the Who`s wont get fooled again and Rory Gallagher playing bought and sold live that does this for me and it is a useful metric, I used this to asses MP3 encoders and decoders. The fraunhoffer codecs preserved the tickle at half the others rates. .

I should probably get my coat.

A con trick

DAB was the most appalling bit of skull-duggery foisted onto the unsuspecting British public in many a year. CD quality? Just who are they kidding? I was an early adopter with a Technics tuner and it all sounded fine initially, but quality has slowly gone down the pan, mainly due, I presume, to the ever-decreasing bit-rates, not to mention the ever-present audio butchering caused by compression and/or processing. Sounds like the dreaded Optimod is still in there somewhere. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere in the mists of time that the original DAB spec. might have included user-adjustable compression. Anyone else got that in the memory banks? If so, it never happened - obviously. ANYTHING might be better than the absolutely appalling sound quality from FM these days. I hardly ever listen to radio, as I find it pretty painful on the ears. Even internet and satellite radio seem to use excessive amounts of compression. All the stations are desperately trying to sound more punchier than the others, with the result that they ALL sound as grotty as hell. Flat as the proverbial pancake. No dynamics - flat-lining. Why the Radio Authority (as was) ever allowed this to happen is beyond me. I have reel-to-reel recordings off FM from many years ago (bearing in mind the upper audio limit is about 15 khz. and they sound brilliant. Today's transmissions are a travesty.