Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodmachine | Hacker News Reader

Bad luck, Norway.

The UK is in a roughly similar position, but our govt is unlikely to switch off FM until 2020-ish at the earliest (was 2015, then 2018... now "whenevs").

It's sad to consider how governments foisted DAB on listeners exclusively for the benefit of state broadcasters - the list of fails is extensive here: DAB gives you demonstrably worse reception, poorer sound quality, more expensive hardware, added costs to replace old hardware, added costs to run (4x power consumption), etc.

The magic carrot of 'more channels/ more choice' thing never happened either: thus, a bum deal all round.

I would guess the upside for broadcasters (cheaper infrastructure, more listeners) may have been significantly overstated too.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/sep/25/digital-radio-s...

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/dec/16/digital-radio-s...

24 problems with DAB (2010)

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/apr/12/dab-r...

View on HN

I remember a few years back being dismayed when I plugged my brand new DAB radio into my Kill-A-Watt and rather than register nothing like the FM radio that it was substituting, it was showing ~ 4 W, going up to ~ 6 W when playing.

Not enough is being said about this, there are still no really energy efficient receivers and on a per-station basis DAB is also a lot more expensive to transmit. DAB only becomes energy efficient at the transmitter end because it's always transmitting a multiplex of many stations.

A few years ago I bought a battery-powered DAB radio so I can listen to Radio 4 in the bath. It will zip through a set of high capacity AA NiMH cells in around 2-3 weeks, the old FM radio used such a small amount of power that Alkaline cells made more sense and would consume around two sets per year.

Thankfully the "more channels/ more choice" actually happened in Norway. However - apart from that, DAB is a bad deal.

Right now it's become a typical "we can't stop right in the middle, so let's continue forward full speed"-situation. So much has been invested in DAB in Norway that stopping the transition would be just as expensive, if not more so.

If DAB was a modern technology that might make sense. However, it was developed in the 1990s around the MP2 codec. It's roughly as old as the web.

You'd not choose DAB if you were doing digital radio today.

Norway is using DAB+, which is based on the modern HE-AAC codec. We were going to use the old MP2-based DAB, but switched to DAB+ pretty quickly.

Right now most channels are being transmitted in either DAB or DAB+ (DAB+ devices can receive both), but DAB+ is the future and DAB is going away. It's going to suck for the early DAB adopters though, who's soon going to be left with incompatible radios.

Early DAB adopters is the UK - we do not have DAB+ and no plans to introduce it. It is a mess.

DAB vendors and implementors should profit nicely, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com