workshy_fopp

Anyone else reckon the sound quality is poor on digital radio compared to a decent analogue tuner? I'm comparing a Grundig portable (stereo) DAB thing to a Denon TU-260 here (same price) and plugged into a reasonable amp n speakers.
It just sounds compressed, like if you play mp3's through a decent hi-fi....? Anyone got a proper £300+ DAB seperate?
Comments please.

ProperCharlie

yes - it's ****e compared to a good FM tuner.

workshy_fopp

Having said that - there's more stuff I like to hear on digital. Listening to old skool Prodigy live on R6 now. Quality is really poor tho.

IWatkins

DAB used to be good, or even excellent in fact.

Then they started dropping bitrates so they could squeeze more channels in and now it sounds chuff. Waste of a great medium.

Still some good ones around, but i tend to listen analg FM or via Freeview (which in most cases has higher bitrates than DAB, but less choice).

Cheers

Ian

super slider

on a recent article i read, only radio 3 has decent bitrates. As is normal (with TV as well), quantity rather than quality
Michael

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

No amount of money spent on a DAB receiver will help much, I'm afraid. The reason it sounds like mp3 is that it's using a similar (in fact older and inferior) compression scheme with a bit rate of only about 128kb/s for many stations. It's probably OK for car and portable use, but through a hi-fi it sucks. I use Shoutcast streaming instead now - the 160kb/s stations are pretty good.

Mark Miwurdz

Covered in depth in The Sunday Times a while ago. The conclusion was the DAB radios are a waste of money.

Cheers
Kav

ProperCharlie

i wouldn't go quite that far. DAB is worth it for picking up the extra stations. also, DAB is better than long wave - i have a portable thing that i use for listening to Test Match Special. The quality of most portable radios isn't high enough to distiguish between DAB and FM in any case - it's only a problem if you are running it through a semi decent hifi.

roll on summer - TMS and a bottle of beer in the back garden!

Monkeh

Any form of digital broadcasting will be poorer quality than Analogue, because they will squeeze as many channels as they can out of the system

Sky digital is sooo bad compared to Analogue, I remember Rai-uno and Rai-duo had amazing picture quality, the first day i got SkyDigi installed i was so dissapointed with the picture.

They could improve the picture to DVD quality, but that would near halve the channels.
The average DVD is 7-12 Megabytes/sec. Sky digital is around 3-6mbytes/sec (i think the movie channels are slightly higher)

StickyMicky

not so, internet based shourcast servers can be encoded in any quality the website decieds to use

Apparition

Am interested to know why all the DAB digi radios I have seen so far look very retro. Is this a trend, or is there a reason ? Think I'll wait a tad longer before plunging into that sphere.