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Comment by hyakosm | Hacker News Reader

DAB is useless because : FM audio quality is enough (actually the bottleneck is the digital compression used in radio studios) ; the FM spectrum isn't saturated ; FM receivers are simple and cheap, it would be absurd to force people to buy new receivers and trash their fully functional radios. An important part of FM listening is in cars, and a lot of cars have custom proprietary radio trays or proprietery interfaces for hand commands buttons. Signal degradation is progressive in FM, but very irritating in DAB.

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> FM audio quality is enough

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.

The difference is only significant if the radio station uses a sufficient bitrate. There are some with atrocious quality in DAB because of their low bitrate.

I can only speak for the UK, but FM here sounds considerably better than DAB because stations on DAB are usually 32 or 64kbps & mono since they want to fit as many stations into the multiplex... (techmoan has a rant about it— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27w3quNTP84)

I had an early dab radio back in 2003ish, it was rubbish.

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.

> you don’t know it until you actually make the switch

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?

The first one

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

Right but it's only when going back to the lower quality version where you realize just how much is missing. So it's the second.

Regular display pixels only became annoying after using a Retina display for a while and then going back. They were fine before.

I disagree with this. I bought decent speakers (they were £300, so good quality but nothing crazy), and I suddenly started enjoying songs that I couldn't understand why anyone liked before, because I could hear details in parts of the music where there were none before.

Got an example of such a song?

Sure, a whole record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Judges_Ruth

C.f. any other record with good dynamic range and interesting stuff below 80Hz.

This phenomena you've described could be part of why Lovett's so misunderstood.

> Regular display pixels only became annoying after using a Retina display for a while and then going back. They were fine before.

Not really. I noticed fewer headaches and eyes getting dry less often after about a month.

Additional details is not always a net plus, IMO some recordings are significantly worse with ‘better’ audio equipment. For example the sounds of people repositioning their hands across musical instruments really bothers me.

> For example the sounds of people repositioning their hands across musical instruments really bothers me.

Would you prefer to be blind because if you can see you can also see a dead body?

Blindness is a straw man argument. I am saying for specific content there are limits to optimum resolution. If we are talking high vs low resolution, then no I don’t want to see extremely high resolution in focus pictures of corpses. Do you?

Let’s be honest, your argument is no less straw man than mine.

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.

I think most people seeing such images are watching documentaries of the Holocaust, news reports of violent crimes etc. Looking away from the screen is a very common reaction, but these shots also tend to avoid closeups because most people don’t want to see it. For a more direct example people turn down gore settings in games because more detail is not always better.

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.

Bit of both!

>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.

It might be appreciable at home, does it still apply in a moving vehicle? I personally can't tell the difference.

I imagine for quite a few readers, car may be fanciest sound system they own and one of the only places they listen to FM radio in the first place.

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.

With good signal strength, DAB wins over FM easily, but it degrades horrifically badly with weaker signal strength, generally I tend to find this isn't that much of an issue with BBC stations, but worse with the commercial stations, and especially worse in a moving vehicle.

(Not that the UK commercial radio space is exactly in a good place anyway after the global/bauer radio-pocalypse).

Depends on the station. Some stations are broadcasting 32Kbit mono audio which certainly doesn't stand up to FM.

Maybe I’m weird but some songs sound better on FM. Eg Bruce Springsteen Born to Run. Maybe it’s nostalgia kicking in

CDs are useless because: Cassette tapes are good enough and they can be recorded. A lot of cars have cassette players, not CD players and they never skip.

You're being downvoted, but I think the comparison is worth considering.

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.

To me, the primary benefit of CDs over tapes was the ability to skip between songs easily and not having to rewind, it wasnt about quality (for me). The operation of a digital radio and an FM radio are very similar, especially once you've set up your favourite stations.

Still waiting for radio that adds enough buffer to allow skipping ahead or rewinding. Somehow mainstream commercial radios(cars, portable, etc.) have avoided adopting the audio equivalent of the DVR. After becoming accustomed to watching TV with a DVR there's a knee-jerk reaction when listening to the radio and the impulse to rewind hits.

It may be that they don't think anyone would use that feature, so it would be extra expenditure for nothing. If you want more control and the guarantee of no adverts, you can pay for a music streaming subscription.

For a relatively old car you can always buy a Bluetooth FM transmitter (connect your phone to the device, device then transmits on a certain frequency)

I've not seen a cassette player in a car for quite a long time, not even the other half's 15+ year old Daihatsu.

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.

It's not about quality, it's about freeing up frequencies for technologies that use the frequency more efficiently. DAB can cram more channels in less frequency space; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting#Use... for details.

So quantity over quality. The UK used to have 4-5 analogue TV stations (the fifth wasn't available everywhere), now it has digital with something like 100+ channels all constantly broadcasting low quality, repetitive rubbish. We got rid of the analogue stations to make way for "+1" channels where they broadcast the same thing 1 hour later. It's a complete waste of the spectrum.

Who cares about a 20 MHz chunk of spectrum near 100 MHz? It's too narrow to be of much use to anyone but FM broadcasters, and the required RF hardware and antennas are too big for most two-way consumer applications. And there's certainly no shortage of VHF spectrum in general, now that most users have gone to 700 MHz+.

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. :(

In my limited experience, driving across the UK on FM is a pain due to regional differences. A couple of hours driving and I'll need to retune a few times, and my saved stations won't be applicable. DAB solves that minor issue at least.

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.

Exactly the same experience. I try DAB every few years while driving and the experience is just the same.

> DAB solves that minor issue at least.

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.

On the car side - Most new cars I've been in for the last 3-4 years, maybe more, tend to come with DAB radio built in. Sometimes it's an optional extra, but standard in an increasingly large proportion of new cars. (Apparently 95% of new UK cars, and 64% of new commercial vehicles in Q4 2019, vs 4% in Q4 2010, 64% Q4 2015).

Agreed on the degradation though.

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