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Is DAB dead and buried now

hifinutt

hifinutt

hifinutt
Took a friends DAB radio in to a nursing home at weekend and even with aeriel up it could find no stations on tuning . useless

Bought a cheap FM roberts radio which works perfectly even with aeriel down . I am a bit mystified but if they had abolished FM this guy would not have his beloved classic FM

Are they still rolling out this DAB idea ?, not heard many ads recently for it
 
They still plan to turn off FM… but I suspect DAB will be replaced by “internet radio”.

DAB has always been great in cars, but not much value elsewhere for a long time.
 
We use DAB everyday for speech radio. Reception is fine here.

When we go on adventures, I add a long bit of wire to the aerial and usually get DAB and FM with no problem.
We usually stick with FM if using a battery radio, because DAB seems to take twice as much power.
 
Works fine where I am. I do know though that the are many areas that can't get a strong enough signal and in my old house I could get fewer stations in the kitchen than I could upstairs.
 
Have DAB in the car and it drops out frequently- very annoying! But there again that's West Wales for you. Mobile phone reception/signal even worse. How do the Taliban manage around the Himalaya's?
 
Ooer, perhaps I won't get rid of my old Cambridge FM tuner, now. And I too have a portable DAB radio in the kitchen which is useless, but the FM predecessor was fine. Progress,, eh?
 
hifinutt said:
Took a friends DAB radio in to a nursing home at weekend and even with aeriel up it could find no stations on tuning . useless

Bought a cheap FM roberts radio which works perfectly even with aeriel down . I am a bit mystified but if they had abolished FM this guy would not have his beloved classic FM

Are they still rolling out this DAB idea ?, not heard many ads recently for it
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Trouble with FM is that a lot of tuners (most? all?) are badly affected by e-m emissions from computers. Which means I'm reduced to listening to DAB when working. Luckily R3 is one of the best DAB stations, in terms of bit rate etc.
 
John R said:
Have DAB in the car and it drops out frequently- very annoying! But there again that's West Wales for you. Mobile phone reception/signal even worse. How do the Taliban manage around the Himalaya's?
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Do the Taliban like DAB then I didn't know. What's their favourite station, Boom Radio?
 
Whaleblue said:
They still plan to turn off FM… but I suspect DAB will be replaced by “internet radio”.

DAB has always been great in cars, but not much value elsewhere for a long time.
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I've got a Pure Avanti Flow sold as a Dab with internet radio. They stopped supporting the internet side and so it's just an expensive Dab radio now. I'm not buying another internet radio unless I know it's not reliant on support from the maker. My Pure Evoke dab only from 20 years ago still works great.
 
Some areas do seem to have poor or no DAB signal , when I drive to Cornwall the signal disappears at Honiton but seems perfect evrywhere else
 
The higher frequency of DAB compared to VHF means that there are more "black holes". Also some stations are missing from some transmitters. Locally Classic FM is not on my nearest transmitter either due to lack of capacity or cost.
 
I have a very good DAB signal with just a telescopic aerial but patchy FM with any indoor aerial. DAB in the car has a habit of dropping out but then again FM isn’t always stable. I prefer the sound of FM but prefer the convenience of DAB.
 
DAB is a dumbed down standard that was superseded and at a technological dead-end when it was released. The main issues are that it's inefficient and broadcasters used too low a bit rate to encode the audio.

From memory, the transmission costs were proportional to the bit rate, which encouraged the station owners to try and get away with a race to the bottom.

I can hear the digital artefacts of many commercial stations which is much more annoying to me than a weak FM signal.

I remember the adverts for DAB, perfect digital quality or something like that. Not with 64Kb/s.
 
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lawrence001 said:
I've got a Pure Avanti Flow sold as a Dab with internet radio. They stopped supporting the internet side and so it's just an expensive Dab radio now. I'm not buying another internet radio unless I know it's not reliant on support from the maker. My Pure Evoke dab only from 20 years ago still works great.
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Sorry to hear that. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, useful to know.
 
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