Analogue radio in the UK given 10-year stay of execution
theregister.com
theregister.com
I really disagree there. The difference in quality between FM and DAB (not even DAB+) is very significant, and I’m not even an audiophile.
The problem is that 1) you don’t know it until you actually make the switch, and it’s not like you can borrow a car stereo system for a week to try it out, and 2) that’s pretty much the only advantage of DAB, from consumers’ perspective, so the price/value proposition is not good enough to make it a no-brainer purchase.
I have dab/FM in the car now, and It’s noticeably better than FM. I use dab almost exclusively, but there are remote areas where only fm reaches.
A perhaps philosophical question: if you have to train yourself to be able to perceive the higher-quality audio, do you end up enjoying the audio more, or are you just training yourself to dislike the lower-quality audio?
It's similar to listening to a song over good headphones instead of crappy notebook speakers for example
You start hearing all the details that were added to the sound.
It's like seeing a movie on the cinema rather than in a small TV for example
Regular display pixels only became annoying after using a Retina display for a while and then going back. They were fine before.
C.f. any other record with good dynamic range and interesting stuff below 80Hz.
Not really. I noticed fewer headaches and eyes getting dry less often after about a month.
Would you prefer to be blind because if you can see you can also see a dead body?
Why not watch high-resolution images of corpses? People working in medicine do this all the time.
You’re clearly making a Luddite argument: under the circumstances of two things being the same but one of them providing a worse resolution anyone reasonable would pick the higher resolution, because you can always go back to a lower resolution but not vice-versa.
A Luddite argument would suggest all media was better at lower resolution, but that’s not what I am saying. Rather specific media for specific people is. Clearly some people want all the gory details even if I don’t.
PS: > you can always go back to a lower resolution
Having a preference is not the same as having a willingness to edit every YouTube video etc I see.
It might be appreciable at home, does it still apply in a moving vehicle? I personally can't tell the difference.
The extremely low bit rate used to broadcast some DAB stations is absolutely noticeable even on “cheap” equipment. The low bitrate issue is compounded further by DAB being mpeg 2 based, which is a hugely inefficient codec by modern audio standards. A 64 Kbps mono mpeg 2 audio stream is not great frankly, and common in DAB.
(Not that the UK commercial radio space is exactly in a good place anyway after the global/bauer radio-pocalypse).
For the average car sound-system, I doubt the quality improvement from the cassette->CD upgrade is going to be all that appreciable. The upgrade to CD only makes sense for a decent sound-system, or if cassettes are no longer available.
This seems comparable to the FM->DAB (or DAB+) upgrade. I don't know about the usage patterns here, but I suspect radio is more often used in vehicles than at home with nice speakers, or with headphones. Perhaps it's different from CD/cassette in that regard, or perhaps not.
CDs are also just as recordable as cassettes.
I suspect that CD players are probably beginning to disappear from cars, in favour of SD cards, USB & Bluetooth - a lot of the youth seem to be moving towards mobile phone-centric audio entertainment in cars as well as everywhere else.
Ultimately, cognitive radio is the correct answer to all questions about how to get the most utility out of the existing spectrum. The only question is whether we'll get cognitive radio or unlimited fusion power first. :(
I don't know the details of the spectrum usage, but there are more niche nationwide stations on DAB (Planet Rock is hardly niche anymore tbh, and is great). So maybe it's more accurate to say the FM spectrum isn't cluttered for barrier to entry reasons.
Enter Germany, where it was decided DAB is not a federal matter and basically you have 16 small states with entirely different stations available on DAB. The one real advantage DAB could have had, and they threw it away just to auction off the same frequency band a couple more times.
Agreed on the degradation though.
I'd bought a number of DAB radios, only to be told I had to buy them once again - but this time, they'd got it right, no worries!
(That being said, I believe transitioning to DAB+ made sense - sound quality is significantly better - however, from a consumer perspective, it is terrible. First have your FM radios obsoleted, then the first-generation DAB radios - and the only thing in it for you as a consumer is to keep the same service you've had all along...
(The main benefit of DAB being that it is significantly cheaper to run the broadcast network, compared to FM.)
This table shows the list of bitrates of radio stations in the UK. BBC Radio 3 (classical music) has the highest bitrate at 192kb for DAB. You get far better bitrates streaming via the web:
I purchased a number of AM radios, only to be told I had to buy them once again when FM came out—but this time, they'd got it right, no worries!
Welcome to technological development. :)
Buying a basic DAB radio is $20 where I live. Not sure I'd call that an "investment".
I’d be pretty pissed if a purchase that costs 5-100k had a core component become “obsolete”.
So another switchover like DAB to DAB+ where everyone throws away their new radios yet again? That point alone kills every consumer appeal it might have ever had...
IMO practical thing would be to add text service to analog AM broadcasts(like teletext) but with ubiquitous internet coverage, that ship has sailed.
You meant 1kbit ot 1kB/s? Neither is "am-quality mono", it's only acceptable with specialized voice codec. Music starts at 32kbit, pls source your claims if you know otherwise.
On the other hand most people have the facility to receive an SMS and most of them have their phone on. The only issue is lack of power to charge a phone. Worse than keeping an AM radio running but in the past people turned on their AM radio at certain pre-organised times of day anyway so there is not really order of magnitude difference between a phone and an AM radio.
I suspect that there are more AM radio receivers in the UK than there are DAB receivers. A couple of months ago, BBC Radio Devon was airing announcements asking for donations from people so that they could buy the poor and elderly new DAB radios because they only had AM radios. It seems to me that if a station to make it a big charity drive, there must be a reason.
In another life I did work on broadcast censorship circumvention into places like China etc; the main concern at the time was that shortwave radios were becoming rare enough to make the traditional big SW/AM TX near borders kind of irrelevant, so focus was moving to online - Tor, et al - because people actually had that tech.
How can you possibly measure who’s is receiving your broadcast over the air signal?
Of course, now that chip-scale receivers with synthesized LOs are ubiquitous, intermediate frequencies are no longer limited to 455 kHz and 10.7 MHz, or even used at all. Consequently this method is no longer of much interest, but it worked for the better part of a century.
I'd speculate that most listening is in the car now. I wonder if any new cars come with AM/FM radios, I'd assume they are all in DAB. In which case it will nearly all be gone in another decade.
https://www.soundandvision.com/content/why-tesla-killing-am-...
Supposedly it's more about AM radio being swamped by the RF interference from the car electrics. There was a Tech Guy segment a while back about someone trying to get AM working on their new Tesla:
https://techguylabs.com/episodes/1422/how-can-i-get-am-radio...
I just checked the specs on the 2020 Hyundai models, and they include an AM/FM radio.
I once tried out one of those little BMW electric cars (i3, maybe. The one that looks like it was designed by Ikea), and it didn't have AM radio for that very reason.
It's kind of a big oversight for a car sold in the United States, where the top ten rated radio stations in most large cities includes a number of AM stations.
Currently in New York, the #5 and #12 stations are AM (WINS and WCBS): https://ratings.radio-online.com/cgi-bin/rol.exe/arb001
In Los Angeles, the #2 and #12 stations are AM (KFI and KNX): https://ratings.radio-online.com/content/arb003
In Chicago, the #1 and #3 stations are AM (WBBM and WGN): https://www.robertfeder.com/2020/06/09/chicago-radio-ratings...
Dropping AM radio isn't something that's really happening in civilized countries. For example, in Australia, where the #1 and #8 stations in Melbourne are on AM (3AW, SEN). I wasn't able to find any ratings for radio stations in Tokyo, but when I scan the dial there, I find a good number of AM stations on the air.
The radio I’m listen to In home at the moment is an internet radio using tunein.
Even if the AM transmitter is operational, it is useless to people who lack the ability to receive AM broadcasts.
All you need is 1 radio in a community and people can huddle up to listen or just a few listen and take information to others.
Cellphone towers run on generators after disasters with no power and they run out of fuel. People would find and take batteries out of anything they had and give them to whoever had a radio to stay informed. Some people had small solar ones or ones with an internal battery and a crank.
Cellphones became useless quick. No signal and they keep searching for a signal wasting battery quickly and a lot of people had no way to charge them. If the towers came back up and you had battery, they where overloaded quickly and useless.
Here’s an article, https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/27/us/puerto-rico-maria-ham-radi...
Easy to build by accident, in fact. In retrospect I've no idea how practical physics labs are approved, with the likelihood that some klutzy undergrad (yo) accidentally builds a high-power broadband AM transmitter.
Pretty unlikely to build a high-power one by accident :)
As you already mentioned, power is another issue, as a modern smartphone won't last past a few weeks, even when turning on for only 5 minutes once a day, whereas I've seen AM radios that can run continuously for at least that long.
Finally, my main concern: cell phones are complicated. An EMP (or flood) could fry all your electronics and you're basically screwed, but finding someone who can build a passable AM receiver (or even transmitter) out of various electronic junk isn't all that difficult.
Commenters on this blog post about the phenomenon claim to have done much better with special antennas, e.g. picking up a station in Los Angeles from Queens, NY: https://news.ccrane.com/2018/07/23/why-am-listening-at-night...
A radio requires only two things to be working: the receiver and the transmitter. That's not usually a big deal, but when it is, it is.
I remember many decades ago, the first time I made a working one, was an absolutely magical experience --- and no doubt countless others have also been amazed and inspired by such a surprisingly simple device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment
> Because it was the middle of the night, there were few people at local radio stations, all operated by Clear Channel with mostly automated programming. No formal emergency warnings were issued for several hours while Minot officials located station managers at home. North Dakota's public radio network, Prairie Public Broadcasting, was notified and did broadcast warnings to citizens.
> The incident has been cited as an example of the physical dangers of media consolidation and the cost-cutting practice of not keeping overnight staff at stations. Even without activation of the Emergency Alert System, a live announcer would still have been able to warn citizens of the emergency via the traditional means of the broadcast signal and an on-air microphone. As local stations were running in automated mode, there was nobody on-site to interrupt programming and issue warnings concerning the disaster.
EAS not cutting in was a problem. Emergency systems need to be redundant for that very reason. Thinking analog radio necessarily means that redundancy is in place is wrong. Our thinking about this must be more careful than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort#Process
They introduced DAB among the broadcasters as a cost saving measure. DAB needs smaller transmission power due to the digital transmission and error correction, so they could get away with far smaller transmitter power (factor 10) than for the same area coverage in FM. But they misestimated the power reduction, reduced too much and now area coverage is far worse than FM even in areas that should nominally be covered.
Also, they first introduced DAB. Some people bought new equipment. Then, a few years later, they introduced DAB+ in a complete switchover, no more DAB stations. Thus everyone had to throw away their new expensive radios.
Therefore no-one trusts the coverage and longevity of digital radio, so no-one buys it anymore.
Oh, and even nominal coverage isn't anywhere near where FM is after two decades.
If you prefer to have no discussion, why visit a discussion board?
About a month ago I found the radio in a cupboard and thought that I should either throw it away or get a replacement power supply. Having done the latter I now find that I rather like having a dedicated Radio 4 early morning device - I don't have to remember where my phone is, I don't have to fit it into some dock or fiddle with an app and is still usable even if I have misplaced by glasses.
The rest of the time I listen to whatever I want in our kitchen via my phone through a UE Boom bluetooth speaker which I inherited from our son. First thing in the morning, and before I have had any coffee, give me the good old fashioned (DAB) radio!
Edit: I should also point out that as we are in a rural area our Internet connection isn't brilliant but we do have fantastic DAB reception as there is a transmitter about 1km away on top of a nearby hill.
It is an awful lot of spectrum - and laws of supply and demand will start to kick in.
Adding in a new range for WiFi is nice but that will take international agreement and frankly no one has charged me for wi-fi spectrum yet and it's it likely to succeed if they try. Scientific applications like back hauling hardly seem profitable.
Maybe adding in a new cellphone range will work - but AM and FM take up what 100khz to 1Ghz range? what's going in there ? I am fascinated. Is it really all aiming at 6G?
For reference, FM radio is roughly 80 to 100 MHz.
Wifi is roughly 2400 to 2500 MHz and 5200 to 5800 MHz. One channel requires 25 MHz. Killing ALL radios would barely free enough room for one wifi.
Also consider repurposed bandwidth with national reach for unidirectional broadcasting of digital data could be useful. Asymmetric networks with differential return path is what direcTV did with sat dishes and modems.
The bandwidth is low, but the reach is phenomenal.
FM is simple enough, but not so simple that people could just jury-rig a receiver/transmitter together in an emergency situation. If you need a store-bought receiver, you might as well have a receiver that's not using tech from 1930s.
For reference, 20 MHz is enough to carry ~3200 voice channels (6.25kHz spacing), or ~1600 data channels of ~10-60 kbps each (12.5kHz spacing).
2-meters FTW!
I love British humour
But now? I don't see the point even if the streams were good quality.
When they started development, cell phones were expensive and not widely used. By the time they deployed, cell phones were much more common, but were mostly just voice and text.
But now they are widely deployed, and usually include internet. They also usually include WiFi and in cities public WiFi is widely available.
It seems more efficient, then, to not have a separate digital radio service and instead just serve digital radio streams over internet.
Then there is no need for people on the go to buy dedicated hardware for listening to radio. They've already got what they need with their phone.
People listening at home might prefer to listen on their A/V receiver than on their computer, but modern A/V receivers have Ethernet and/or WiFi and know how to stream, so again internet streaming can serve the needs that would have been served by digital radio. (And if they don't, it is almost certain that something else hooked up to your A/V systems, such as a Roku or a Fire Stick or a Blu-ray or a cable set top box or a TV has an internet radio app).
Keep analog radio. It doesn't use a lot of bandwidth [2], and you can make really cheap receivers that run for a very long time on batteries or hand cranks and do not require configuration or buying a service. It makes a good backup to have for emergencies.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739360
[2] This may vary from country to country, but I think generally the AM band is about 1 MHz wide and FM about 20 MHz wide. In TV terms, that's about 1/6th the bandwidth of a single color TV channel for all of AM, and a tad under 3.5 color TV channels of bandwidth for all of FM.
Since internet coverage is so wide, I can always receive digital radio online, should I wish to.
In the case I am somewhere with bad data reception, I would probably preffer FM.
people don't buy standalone radio receivers, and haven't in decades.
My car is a 2015. My wife's car is 2016. Neither have digital radio, much to my disappointment.
people don't buy standalone radio receivers, and haven't in decades
Except that they do, which is why they're still available in stores. I bought one at Target just last fall for a relative who was in the hospital for an extended stay.
Count yourself fortunate.
That's a nice inexpensive upgrade, and can be an alternative to having a digital radio installed.
No need to. The car has Bluetooth. It also has a USB port, an aux port, and an SD Card slot for playing music. It just doesn't have digital radio.
in fact, most of these people here defending analog have been using digital for years. this conversation however is not about fm. the switch to digital there was a long time ago. it's about am, whose ship is sailing now.
> Analogue radio station licences will be extended for another 10 years, the UK government has said – entirely reversing plans to shut off FM and AM radio stations in favour of DAB digital radio.
Seem to be lots of them in stores, everything from the local supermarket to higher-end department stores, to me. I see them in most people’s kitchens as well.
> Analogue radio station licences will be extended for another 10 years, the UK government has said – entirely reversing plans to shut off FM and AM radio stations in favour of DAB digital radio.
First comment in this subthread: "digital radio just can't compete". No distinction AM vs FM
Your response to that claims that "all modern cars have digital" and that "people don't buy standalone radio receivers, and haven't in decades." Doesn't mention AM vs FM.
/u/chrisseaton comments about dedicated radios clearly being widely sold. No mention of AM vs FM.
You claim that's an anomaly. You then also introduce AM for the first time in your claim about people <40 not knowing about it.
I comment that's wrong. And it is: AM very much was a relevant thing for a large part of the lives of many people under 40. It happens to have been shut off a few years ago where I live, with FM going strong.
So where is the strawman? In that I dared to mentioned analog radio in general, which was part of most of the discussion in this subthread, in my last response? What "whole discussion" is about AM specifically?
I don't know what alternate reality thread you're in.
The article is about switching-off analog radio, not specifically AM.
Then you said 'people don't buy standalone radio receivers' which I mean is just verifiable nonsense - go to any supermarket, electronics store, department store, and there's a huge range for different budgets, tastes, ages. Many of them cost hundreds of pounds.
You might be bringing a more American perspective to this. Note it's a British article and issue. In the UK, very high-quality 'talk radio' is much more part of mainstream daily family life for all kinds of people and it's pretty normal to for example have a kitchen radio to have on during breakfast. Also note that 'talk radio' here is more often an FM thing, not an AM thing.
About a quarter of the population listens to the top 'talk radio' station here.