View Single Post
      12-20-2012, 12:59 PM   #16
DieselRocket
First Lieutenant
United Kingdom
60
Rep
355
Posts

Drives: 435d M Sport
Join Date: Sep 2012
Location: Bristol

iTrader: (0)

Just to offer another angle on this topic. DAB is great, but it's principle benefit is being able to pick up more (many more) stations.

There's a general belief that DAB is superior in sound quality, but the reality is that DAB is behind FM by some margin. You could say that DAB is to radio what MP3 is to music - i.e. it adds convenience and brings more music to more people (wonderful), but the sound quality suffers through a good system.

DAB could sound good, but the amount of bandwidth allocated to channels and stations when it was first setup leave it lagging good FM stations by miles. For a lot of people, MP3 is just fine (and most have never heard good or even modest hi-fi). Likewise, most will be happy with DAB, but it's worth knowing that it's a compromise in sound quality terms.

How much you hear of this is down to how good your tuner, amp and speakers are, but a good in-car system would show up the difference and a moderate home hi-fi would be night and day. On a big home rig, DAB sounds thin and one-dimensional, with no depth & richness.

The benefit you do get sound-wise from DAB is that it's more resilient to noise. So, given an average to weak signal, DAB will play you little or no perceived noise or hiss compared to FM. But when you have an average to good FM signal, the potential sound quality is way better. The difference is less noticeable on poppy stations like Radio 1, but it's vast on stations like Radio 4 and Radio 3.

Anyway, just sharing this in case it affects your thinking on DAB vs. FM. You're not buying better sound quality - just more stations.
Appreciate 0