Bit of hindsight bias there, DAB was first developed in the mid 1990s, ubiquitous fast wireless IP in everyone’s pockets is at least a decade, perhaps nearer to 20 years in the future. There are quite a few transitionary technologies that we needn’t have developed had we just waited for something better to come along (but without the R&D into some of them…).
(Also doesn’t analogue FM also kinda cut off fairly abruptly?)
FM stays listenable even with heavy distortions when you drive out of range and you can decide for yourself when you no longer tolerate the signal. Digital doesn’t give you warnings and just goes silent
In my experience DAB goes painfully 'squawky' and squeaky before finally cutting out, it's unbearable in headphones.
This video gives a good example of the signal breaking down from 00:38
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-ihmXOy1h4
DAB+ receivers can (and many do) display signal quality. Not playing distorted, noisy signals is a feature I greatly appreciate.
It’s a digital cliff. Analog fades away but is never a true replication digital remains stable for over but then vanishes.
At the same quality dab is still perfectly long after fm becomes gabled. It then vanishes.
The problem with dab in early days was the lower strength, the poor quality decoding, and the lower bitratr than should be been used for the codec.
Not entirely true. There's quite a bit of error correction applied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting#Err...
> Not playing distorted, noisy signals is a feature I greatly appreciate
Haha. The DAB+ signals are compressed as much as possible.
Some more than others. E.g. Deutschlandfunk Kultur is broadcasted in decent quality, as is NDR3. Klassik Radio fares poorer, but that's due to the bandwidth allocated to them.
Comparison here is FM, not FLAC.
Especially so with digital public TV. its absolutely unusable. and now they can't stand that people want to share sports broadcasts, so they are updating it again to add encryption. I can't believe anyone watches it.
I have a DAB radio and it gets constant interference. Meanwhile FM is stable. In the same set up.
Really soured me on this digital radio technology.