Re: BBC Proms Radio 3 - relentless stutter

In article <4d99c38737dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
> On R3 and R4 (most of the time), I doubt most could tell the difference
> between DAB and Freeview. But most pop stuff on DAB sounds truly dreadful
> due to low bitrate. Apparently, the public want choice over quality for
> this sort of stuff. Allegedly.

Are you sure you haven't put these the wrong way round? I have a tuner that
can receive both DAB and FM, and can listen to either through a good quality
hi-fi system, and the difference is quite clear with classical music or
speech, but to my ears, electronic pop music sounds electronic whatever I
use to listen to it (which is probably why I don't listen to pop music very
much).

I also have a DAB-only portable and over the years have owned more FM tuners
and receivers than I can remember (having built a few of them myself). The
DAB portable has a line output with which I can feed it into the hi-fi
system, which enables me to hear the same gritty burbling digital artefacts
that come out of the hi-fi tuner when switched to DAB, though when listening
through its own loudspeaker it doesn't sound any worse than a portable radio
normally does. I had hoped that the hi-fi tuner would give better sound than
the line output from the portable, but it doesn't. If I'd known this I'd
probably have bought an FM-only tuner.

So take your choice, depending on how "serious" you think your radio
listening is likely to be, though my recommendation for a portable would be
to get one that can do *both* FM and DAB, and has a line-level stereo output
which you could connect to a hi-fi system. Then you have all eventualities
covered, as an FM portable fed through a hi-fi system can sound quite good.

The story about DAB signals not fading is complete nonsense by the way,
because if a radio signal fades enough you eventually won't be able to
receive it no matter what transmission system is used, because if it ain't
there it ain't there. DAB reception just disappears rather differently. As
the signal fades, instead of becoming more hissy as FM would do, the sound
gives no hint of any problem until it suddenly screetches and yelps and then
disappears altogether.

Rod.

.

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