Julf
Facts are our friends
Erm... The BBC continue to use NICAM for their distribution to FM transmitters.
OK, I was told by a friend who used to work for BBC that they had moved on to AAC, but he might be wrong.
And the deciding if it is better/worse than mp3 would probably depend on the case - e.g. choice of mp3 encoding rate, settings, etc. However it is worth noting that for low level audio NICAM doesn't lose any bits that would come though using LPCM. And stations like R3 spend a fair portion of the time at low modulation.
Right - I just remember listening tests comparing NICAM to 320k MP3.