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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

One issue I have with DAB and the like is their short-livedness. FM and AM radio was figured out almost 100 years ago, while for DAB there are already discussions of replacing it with 5G. So buying a DAB receiver is much more likely to turn out to be an investment for something that you will have to re-buy every 5 years as the technology is progressing.

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-Indeed. Norway adopted DAB early - test broadcasts started sometime in the late nineties - but a couple of years ago when the majority of the FM broadcast towers were switched off, the DAB encoding scheme also changed from DAB to DAB+, rendering most receivers sold as future-proof radios useless.

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.)

Worth mentioning in the UK things are still DAB and there is no plan to migrate to DAB+.

UK uses both DAB and DAB+. Majority of stations are DAB+ now with a lot progressively moving.

The UK also adopted DAB early and is now stuck with low-bitrate sound quality. When DAB was first promoted in the UK to encourage sales of DAB radios, one of the claims made was that it would provide "CD quality sound". It soon become obvious that the low-bitrates (in order to cram more stations in the radio spectrum) meant the sound quality was anything but CD quality. The sound quality claims were eventually dropped and became "crystal clear sound" or better reception.

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:

https://www.astra2sat.com/radio/uk-digital-radio-bitrates/

> 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!

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. :)

AM and FM broadcast radio are licensed in seperate spectrum in most of the world (AM on the medium wave band, FM in VHF). Broadcast FM didn't replace AM radio outright, and there are still loads of AM stations. In some very rural areas in North America, it's the only broadcast radio you can receive. There was also a significantly longer gap between the instruction of broadcast AM and FM and the gap between DAB and DAB+.

Turn on your old FM. In Oslo at least several stations still broadcast.

Out here in the boonies, the only FM broadcast still available is the so-called 'Vår Herres Radio'...

That's right. DAB is digital over AM, but there's another much more exciting technology called DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) that uses the SW bands to deliver 72kbps (currently HE-AAC but xHE-AAC in the future) over the Shortwave Bands. This has the potential to make use of very efficient transmitters with very long range. The encoding and bitrates are comparable to DAB+.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale

> currently HE-AAC but xHE-AAC in the future

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...

Every advances further speeds up new advances like log scaling.

> So buying a DAB receiver is much more likely to turn out to be an investment

Buying a basic DAB radio is $20 where I live. Not sure I'd call that an "investment".

And the cost of getting it in your car? I’d imagine it’s quite a lot more than $20.

I’d be pretty pissed if a purchase that costs 5-100k had a core component become “obsolete”.

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