Re: Digital Radio Show - day one

Richard L wrote:
In message <4483ef16$0$31656$e4fe514c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
hwh <iimeeltje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Richard L wrote:

Not true in the sense that you mean it. For listeners who already had
a good FM signal, the improvement offered by digital could never be
more than minuscule -- and if that had been all DAB was about,
Europe's broadcasters would have found themselves under fire from all
sides for squandering licence-payers' money on something hardly anyone
could hear.
Then why was the system developed and tested at 256 kbps

Because they wanted it to be capable of at least matching FM quality.
Digital meant improvement. But that can't have been the main reason
for pursuing DAB, because the potential for improving on the _audio_
quality was so slight. Few people would have noticed or cared.

And yet they tried. And succeeded.

and did the BBC engineers write about " pushing things a bit" when it was suggested they they could use only 192 kbps?

Because up to that era, audio engineering had been all about improving
audio quality. But we had reached a stage where we were into
diminishing returns: the quality of the FM audio transmission was good
enough for almost anyone, and therefore any proposed digital system
would have to justify itself in other, more compelling ways.

If FM quality is good enough, then why don't they use DAB in a way that at least matches that? Improving on it might not be interesting to "almost anyone" but surely that doesn't mean they should go backwards from that?

Someone
then realised that audio quality is a factor that radio audiences in
general are relatively insensitive to, and that DAB would be more
appealing if they deployed the capacity in other ways.

If the audio quality is not a factor for radio audiences in general then why was AM radio abandoned largely by the same audience after BBC R1 got its own FM network even when several stations were available using the old system?

The BBC had only three FM networks in place at the time and just one multiplex could provide four (PL3) stations at 256 kbps. Adding another and the number would double and in main population centers more allocations would be possible.

But the new networks the BBC has introduced have been national ones,
in pursuit of the TV model of adding services to satisfy niche
audiences, so main population centres don't come into it. And it
didn't have that second DAB allocation. Certainly things would have
been better if it had, but it hadn't.

No commercial stations (national ones) had FM networks at the time, so going from three to eight (total) seems a rather large improvement to me. I wasn't talking about the BBC only.


Myself, I think it's pointless to keep fussing about DAB audio quality
when there must be higher priorities for the audiophile. For example,
why do the BBC's satellite and Freeview radio services get no more
than 192 kbit/s while its four main television services get twice 256
kbit/s -- even though they carry so little music, and though the sound
is only a supplement to the pictures rather than a primary medium, and
though the secondary audio channel (for audio description) is so
seldom used? And that's without considering all those under-used 'red
button' streams....


DAB, DVB or other broadcast media on the one hand and audiophile on the other have nothing in common. Broadcasting is not for audiophiles it is for normal people wondering why this "digital" system does not sound properly, as they have been led to believe by heavy advertising.

A real audiophile doesn't touch compressed audio at all. I'm not one by the way.

gr, hwh
.