They’ve recently launched Digital Radio here in Australia with very little fanfare and almost no explanation of how it’s an improvement over existing AM/FM radio.
This isn’t “Satellite Radio” like the Sirius or XM networks in the US- it’s basically a radio version of Digital TV, and is known as Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB+ is the standard here, I believe).
Now, Digital TV is (at least here) a vast, astronomical improvement over analogue TV- even on a CRT set, a SD Digital picture is noticeably sharper and clearer.
However, I’m not sure what the “point” of digital radio is- especially since digital radio receivers are over AUD$200 and nothing to write home about (they’re about the size of a medium transistor radio) and the stations can also be picked up by Digital TVs.
As near as I can tell, the “point” appears to be that a Digital Radio Station takes up less frequency bandwidth than an analogue one and thus the Government can make bucketloads of cash from licensing fees to all the new radio stations.
But what’s the benefit to the consumer? Unless you’re a hardcore audiophile or live somewhere with crappy analogue reception, I’m not convinced Digital Radio is a noticeable improvement over FM, for the most part.
Anyone who’s got some insight able to shed some light on it?
I’m not sure, it exists here in the US but hasn’t made much of an impact that I can see. Digital allows the stations to provide more “stations” in the same bandwidth, but I don’t know if lack of bandwidth is really a problem that radio stations have.
Personally, when I do listen to FM radio it’s in a noisy environment like my car or truck, so audio quality is not critical.
The sound quality is better than standard FM, and being a digital signal, it’s perfect or it’s silent. Ironicaly, that’s a significant thing in the San Francisco region - between the buildings and mountains, FM radio is often spotty. At home, I can’t hang on to a signal for long before it starts sputtering with multipath interference. At my downtown office, reception is often so poor that I just have to put the radio into mono, which kills off a lot of the static.
It does open up interesting possibilities for the radio stations. The station I listen to has decades’ worth of original programs and in-studio performances. With their “extra” digital channels, they can run these full-time in addition to their regular analog programming.
Unless they boost the signal, if you’re getting poor analog reception now, you simply won’t get anything with a digital signal. Or it’ll drop out so much that it’s impossible to listen to it.
I consider this a significant disadvantage. The brain’s quite good at filtering noise & processing sound into music/language. If I only have a radio to listen to, I’d rather get a staticky, noisy but recognizable broadcast than pure silence.
Ability to send more information than just the music (digital radio receivers have screens in them, which means stations can send things like captions for which song/artist is currently playing, weather, traffic, whatever they program - some receivers can only display text, some can display images)
That is the main and most important one. Digital radio can truly be “CD quality”. All analog radio stations are terribly compressed. They have to be for it to be broadcast. I found this out when I helped get a 100,000 watt Community Radio station in Kansas City, Mo on the air. My wife had a radio show, and I was able to listen to the show live in the studio and switch to a monitor tuner. The difference was appalling.
That is the other major one. A station can have multiple channels in their bandwidth - a music station can have different sub-channels with different genres of music; a news station could have a sub-channel with a 24 hour “headline” news approach so you could always get the main stories while the main channel was busy with opinion stuff.
Who knows if it will work out that way. If I know US radio programmers, it will eventually devolve to every single station having the same four styles on four subchannels - Top 40, Classic Rock, Modern Country and R&B. But we can hope.
They could do that with an analog radio, but digital makes it easier. Also, any digital radio should have memory for a cache to allow the music to continue when the listener is driving through a tunnel or under a bridge.
In the US, the main differences are that there are significantly more channels and more variety, fewer commercials (or at least, there was–I’m not sure if that stayed true), and less government oversight of foul language and whatnot.
I have no idea if any of those is relevant to the Australian system of which you speak. If you aren’t getting any of those, then possibly its not a big advantage to you.
That’s satellite radio. Digital radio in the US is the equivalent of digital television: digital over-the-air broadcasts of local stations, with a subchannel or two of extra programming thrown in.
I’ve got a Boston Acoustics clock radio that can receive IBOC broadcasts. There’s almost no discernible difference in quality between the FM signal and the locked-in “HD Radio” signal; the sound on many stations is still compressed and overly loud, and thus still sounds like crap even if it’s “CD quality”. Digital broadcasts seem to radiate over a shorter distance than analog FM. The programming on some digital signals aren’t properly synched with the FM signal, so at the fringe of the digital reception area, where the signal locks and unlocks constantly, such stations become unlistenable.
The advantages: extra programming (for example, if your local NPR station is one of those with programming dominated by jazz or classical music, there may be a news subchannel where you can hear NPR talk programming), and receivers that seem more selective for regular FM.
FWIW, the sound quality of Sirius is superior to that of IBOC. There’s less audio compression.
Could that just be a reflection on quality of your radio? All aspects of FM radio (SNR, headroom, freq. response) are so terrible that it is hard to believe that there would not be a discernible difference between that and a digital broadcast.
Just because digital radio can deliver an excellent quality signal doesn’t mean that it will be used to deliver an excellent quality signal. I’m sure there are any number of engineers who set up their new toy to deliver a true CD quality signal - then were forced to compress it every bit as much by some asshole manager who flipped back and forth between the analog and digital versions of their station and noticed that the digital one wasn’t as “loud” (because it actually has dynamic range). That’s why modern CDs should so shitty - the result of a loudness war.
The sole reason is bandwidth. It takes less amount of bandwidth to transmit digital than analog. Oh there are lots of “side” reasons like those posters above me have listed, but the final reason is, if it takes less bandwidth than the government can free up that bandwidth for other things, such as wireless internet, or cell phones or whatever.
I love it for the subchannels. The PBS affiliate in Orlando plays classical music some parts of the day and NPR/PRI programming during the rest. Their HD2 station plays classical music all day long.
Other stations have similar arrangements. I believe they can have up to two additional channels alongside the main digital channel, which usually mirrors the analog broadcast.
On the sound quality thing, it can be as good or as bad as the broadcasters desire. DAB has been around in the UK for a few years now, and there has always been criticism about the sound quality. Some of the channels run at 96kbps mono and sound more like AM. And FM can, of course, sound great, close to CD quality, with a good signal and no dynamic range compression.
If we had no asshole managers, our popular culture would be limited to drawing on cave walls with sharp rocks. The difference is that today, asshole managers have fixed the game so that they can do no wrong.
That’s the first time I’ve ever seen asshole managers defended as a prime creative force. Don’t believe it, but points awarded for trying. Please accept this small gold plated plastic cup.