201–210 of 289 posts
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I agree the delay is annoying (especially for live events that you are watching - e.g. fireworks) but overall I've found DAB to be far preferable to FM. Admittedly I pretty much only listen to BBC Radio 4 which is mainly voice rather than music.
And for that matter, AM degrades even better than FM -- at least to my ear I prefer AM static to FM fading.
Unless I'm wrong about aircraft still using AM too. :)
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It seems that to achieve the same perceived quality as FM you need about 160kbit/s (when using DAB). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_broadcasting
If you live next to the radio tower, perhaps. I prefer to have more sound in my noise than FM can offer.
I know I am properly a outlier but how many people on HN actually listens to radio over FM/DAB/Other non IP systems? I dont remember when I last listened to radio. Even in the car the entertainment is one or more of the following from the connected phone: - Streaming or locally stored music - Podcasts (which may include shows produced by radio stations). - Audiobooks. At home its the same, either played directly on t…
* Live radio accounts for 74% of the share of all UK audio consumption. It reaches 90% of the population.
* 38% of audio listening is on devices other than radio sets, primarily PC/laptop (11% of all audio) and smartphones (8%).
* On-demand music services account for 6% share of audio time and are listened to by 7.6 million people each week.
RAJAR http://www.rajar.co.uk/
Audio Time – What the RAJAR MIDAS Audio Survey says about listening in the digital age http://www.rajar.co.uk/docs/news/Audio_Time%20_FINAL_pages.p...
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> It's because the infrastructure for FM is quite expensive to run. Won't the free market decide if it's too expensive to run? Or is even radio run by the state in Norway? Otherwise, why prohibit private companies from licensing & broadcasting FM radio? I mean the free market would decide stop to broadcasting when it's not profitable for them anymore. Or is everything state-run in Norway? When I read "one member of t…
> Or is even radio run by the state in Norway? As a Scandinavian, that is kinda fun to read. Of course Radio is state run. I still get surprised when I hear commercials on the privately owned stations. Private radio stations pretty much became a thing after I grew up and stopped listening to Radio. When I was a kid, there were maybe one commercial station and they didn't air in my city. Commercial TV-station were sti…
OK, so you switch off a completely fine technology with billions invested, rendering useless multi-millions of fine working radios. For what? I think this will be the death blow to radio. People will not go DAB if not absolutely needed, they will essentially try to go "internet" directly and thereby eliminating classic "radio". Maybe you'll use the DAB in your car sometimes, but I can't imagine it will happen that yo…
...and Cars are not there yet. We have strong campaign for DAB once a year here in Germany to remind people that there is something like DAB+. We had one this year again. Thats when I realized that despite using so many rental cars, I haven't seen one with DAB. So I guess it's an extra you have to pay for more then for FM. I don't know anyone having a DAB radio. I guess people remember the DVBT debacle from a few yea…
I like that the UK will switch over once usage reaches 50% -- abandoning a huge number of listeners! They should abandon it when it becomes vestigial -- say more than L5K/listener/year or something like that. Clearly money or techno-determinism is at play.
I believe they said they will look again at the issue once usage exceeds 50%. Which would probably mean a decision to switch including a multiyear runway.
This could allow them to switch off FM even if more people listen to FM than DAB radio, depending on the growth of other forms of digital listening.
OK, so you switch off a completely fine technology with billions invested, rendering useless multi-millions of fine working radios. For what? I think this will be the death blow to radio. People will not go DAB if not absolutely needed, they will essentially try to go "internet" directly and thereby eliminating classic "radio". Maybe you'll use the DAB in your car sometimes, but I can't imagine it will happen that yo…
I own a synthesizer (OP-1) that has a built-in FM receiver for sampling and for fun. Creativity-vise, it's an ingenious feature. Essentially, you can pull new sounds out of thin air whenever you feel like it. No need to connect or set anything up.
Why does it work so well? The receiver is cheap, the radio service is free, the way it works is universal and it's something reliably present in most countries. DAB sounds like it will not have any of these properties initially, and it will never have all of those properties.
My point is that the combination of those features enabled companies to create innumerable innovative appliances that use radio (from cheap radio clock to my Swedish synth). Switching to DAB will not only make existing devices useless, it will also kill the possibility of having new innovative applications in the future.
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This kind of stuff bothers me, because it's increasingly common these days. People replace reliable, working technologies with something "modern" and claim they are making progress, while completely ignoring higher level architectural considerations.
Consider another thing: the money spent on this kind of stuff can be instead spent on making better Internet infrastructure, which can house digital TV, digital radio, digital phones, but also websites, online games, (soon) connected VR spaces, and things we can't even imagine yet.
The NPR One radio app costs me an extra $20 dollars a month due to high data usage. And NPR gets none of that cash. If my phone had user facing FM tuning I could probably contribute directly to content creators. I wonder if shutting down FM and replacing it with much more expensive mobile data is a conspiracy by cellular carriers?
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...and Cars are not there yet. We have strong campaign for DAB once a year here in Germany to remind people that there is something like DAB+. We had one this year again. Thats when I realized that despite using so many rental cars, I haven't seen one with DAB. So I guess it's an extra you have to pay for more then for FM. I don't know anyone having a DAB radio. I guess people remember the DVBT debacle from a few yea…
Digital TV in the US flopped, as far as I can tell. Broadcasters were killed by their own greed. If a Roku is cheaper than an adapter box, and some of the channels on it are also free-with-commercials, as well as cheap paid content, broadcasters push people away with the transition.
Genuinely curious, but what are you using to measure this, or better asked: how do you define flopped? A year ago before I finally had everything in line to drop out of the workforce and go to Grad school I spent a lot of time in rural America and I met a LOT of people who didn't have Cable, but relied on rabbit ears plugged into converter boxes to get digital TV.
Heck, for a while I even used it-and preferred it, forced me to do something other than sitting on the couch staring at a big rectangular box. Got me my local stations, which were more than enough to have soap opera / background filler noise on while I worked from home and got my Sunday football fix.
Middle America conveniently forgotten once again?
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...and Cars are not there yet. We have strong campaign for DAB once a year here in Germany to remind people that there is something like DAB+. We had one this year again. Thats when I realized that despite using so many rental cars, I haven't seen one with DAB. So I guess it's an extra you have to pay for more then for FM. I don't know anyone having a DAB radio. I guess people remember the DVBT debacle from a few yea…
Digital TV in the US flopped, as far as I can tell. Broadcasters were killed by their own greed. If a Roku is cheaper than an adapter box, and some of the channels on it are also free-with-commercials, as well as cheap paid content, broadcasters push people away with the transition.