Petition to stop FM being switched off

In article ,
Mark wrote:
On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:04:35 +0100, "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:

In article ,
Eeyore wrote:


"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Besides, DAB is inferior. Good FM beats it hands down.

I'm surprised at that statement from you, Graham. DAB at a decent
bitrate knocks FM into touch. Of course if you want to compare 'good'
FM to poor bitrate DAB to make a point, so be it.

DAB sadly AIUI uses an ancient codec that's fixed in stone. The
choice of codec should have been left open to allow for improvements.

Just how? The receiver had to decode the signal. And making one which
could be re-programmed would cost a fortune. But of course it is
proposed to change the codec on DAB - making all older sets obsolete.

I'm not convinced. A lot of consumer level electronics have firmware
that can be updated 'over the air'. MP3 players, mobile phones and STBs
to name but 3.

But all these are a long way down the line from when the DAB spec was
finalised.

--
*Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery? *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

charles wrote:
In article , Paul D.Smith
wrote:

And why would I want to purchase something that only works in the UK?

why not, your TV only worked in the UK?

Because I don't drive my TV around europe!!!

I may not be able to understand the languages as I drive through Belgium,
Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, but I do like to listen to
their music.

galaxyguy wrote:
Incidentally, concerning the
petition it is a major error that it was composed by someone unable to
spell analogue correctly. I would willingly sign any FM/AM petition
written in English. Presenting American spelling is something of a
disaster and shoots us in the foot.
Please rectify it at once.

If they did that then all the existing signatories would have to be
contacted to resign the 'new' petition, or they'd all have to be removed.

Pete Zahut wrote:
charles wrote:
In article , Paul D.Smith
wrote:

And why would I want to purchase something that only works in the UK?
why not, your TV only worked in the UK?

Because I don't drive my TV around europe!!!

I did. Until I realised it only gave me sound..

I may not be able to understand the languages as I drive through Belgium,
Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, but I do like to listen to
their music.

Er..well..no, not really.

I remember driving through france, and endless succession of soppy ballads.

In germany its beer drinking brass band muzak for die wurkahs.

At least Holland gave us Golden Earring and so on..

The message
from The Natural Philosopher contains these words:

Roderick Stewart wrote:
In article , Ian
Smith wrote:
I don't agree with you in terms of quality. I have an excellent
sound system and I've never managed to get anything that gets near
hiss-free on FM.

This is very much like the vinyl v CD discussion. Vinyl have me
crackly playback, oven on a good deck and with a new pressing. CD
gave me click and pop free playback - no matter what any HiFi mag
says, the 'quality' of my CD experience is higher.

Hiss, the presence or absence of, is not the only measure of "quality".
The hiss on FM is simply superimposed on the sound, and doesn't alter
what it sounds like. Digital sound with bit-rate reduction is quite a
different situation.

The comparison between FM and DAB is nothing like the comparison
between gramophone recordings and compact discs. The digital bit rate
on CD is about 10 times the best rates we are now using on DAB and is
not subject to any destructive bit-rate reduction.

And that resolves to how much the compression algorithms suit teh
material being played.

Its possible to do intelligible speech at 50 baud..it must be, because
you can read a telex at 50 baud and speak it out in real time

Rod.
:-)

You cant do teh nunaces of a full orchestra like that, though.

Must take at least 300 baud to transmit the score, and have an orchestra
play it, but that loses the nuances altogether ;-)

Listening to music module tracks just now made me consider exactly what
you've just stated above. About 12 or 13 years ago, I copied 3,636
music modules from a music module compilation CD that a club member had
brought into the Computer club meeting.

That was back in the day when home computing was still a relatively new
phenomena and a minority interest with a sufficiently technical element
to warrant the formation of a computer club.

However, even I had abandoned my homebuilt Transam Tuscan S100 Bus
machine by then in favour of home built IBM clone PCs and the club
activity was starting to decline into more mundane file copying and
network gaming fests. I quit the club altogether about a year later but
I do still have those 3.600 odd music modules as a sort of keepsake of
happier times when computer viruses were nothing more than proof of
concept exercises.

The point I want to make here, is that a CD's worth of music modules
(some 3,600 odd of them) represents around two to three hundred hours
worth of music. It's hard to estimate exactly without running some sort
of auditing feature to total up the minutes and seconds play time of
each individual tune. However, a rough estimate of 3 minutes average per
tune suggests a 'Ball Park' figure around the 200 hour mark (and I
suspect I might be underestimating the average playing time).

Now, for those that haven't heard of music modules (which originated on
amiga computers and were swiftly ported to the humble, at that time, IBM
Clone PC) these are files ranging from some 50 odd KB to some 500KB in
size containing 'songs' or 'tunes' lasting anywhere from a minute or so
to 10 or more minutes with file size being _NO_ reliable indicator of
song length.

Effectively, they were a cross between a midi and a wave file. That is
to say, they comprised a 'score' and samples of all the sounds to be
used in the tune. The samples were usually a mid range note of whatever
instrument needed to be represented but could be anything, electric
drills, human voice, even whole words or phrases.

Unlike a midi file, which relied on the sound bank built into whatever
soundcard was installed, music mod files supplied their own music
samples. This made them a little bit bigger than a midi equivilent but,
more importantly, it made them entirely self contained with no reliance
whatsoever on the range and quality of the built in sound samples of the
soundcard (or computer).

Although a midi file represents a very high compression method to play
music, it's a bit of a cheat since the 'reproduction' is highly
dependent on and restricted to the pre- stored bank of sound samples
that happen to be available on the PC.

A music module, otoh, will sound pretty much the same regardless of the
pre-stored midi samples, so represents a real compression algorithm, one
that, on average, seems to hover around the 200 to 1 mark.

HTH & HAND

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

Ian Smith wrote:
jasee wrote:
Alan wrote:
In message , DAB sounds worse than
FM wrote
There's a 10 Downing St petition to stop FM/AM being switched off:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/AM-FM-Radio/

Why would anyone want to sign something that may prevent us getting
hundreds of radio stations on DAB?

Why would it do that?
How many more rubbish radio stations (at lower quality than FM) do you
want anyway?


I have a good tuner and the sound on DAB is fine. Better by far than the
hissy FM I used to get, even with a very good external FM aerial. I gave
my FM tuner away.

I have a very good FM tuner and it sounds FAR better than DAB.
90% of DAB is awful, phasey, bubbling, gritty rubbish.
10% is OK but still worse than FM.

I have an FM tuner, 2 x portables and 2 x car radios.
I do not want to buy 5 x DAB radios.

FM isn't being switched off. National networks are being transferred to
DAB (+ DVB etc etc) and FM re-allocated to local 'community' radio.

There's no way I would sign - the faster we switch the better.

regards, Ian

Guy

"Paul Martin" wrote in message

In article ,
Kráftéé wrote:
jasee wrote:
Alan wrote:
In message , DAB sounds worse
than FM wrote
There's a 10 Downing St petition to stop FM/AM being switched
off:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/AM-FM-Radio/


Why would anyone want to sign something that may prevent us
getting
hundreds of radio stations on DAB?

Why would it do that?
How many more rubbish radio stations (at lower quality than FM) do
you want anyway?

But with a greater bandwidth they wouldn't have to compress the
audio
so much & so you could have better quality sound, the way it should
be!

What greater bandwidth? The trend has been to crank down the
bitrates,
from 128kbps, to 112kbps, and even 96kbps.


Or to switch from stereo to mono to save even more bandwidth...


Of the commercial stations,
only Classic FM has used a half-decent bitrate (160kbps).


Literally 98% of stereo stations on DAB in the UK use a bit rate of
112 or 128 kbps (counting multiple instances of the same station when
they're on different multiplexes).



--
Steve - www.savefm.org - stop the BBC bullies switching off FM

www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - digital radio news & info

"It is the sheer volume of online audio content available via
internet-connected devices which terrifies the UK radio industry. I
believe that broadband-delivered radio will explode in the years to
come, offering very local, unregulated content, as well as opening a
window to the radio stations of the world." - from the Myers Report

Fredxx wrote:
"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Roderick Stewart wrote:
In article , The Natural Philosopher
wrote:
The comparison between FM and DAB is nothing like the comparison
between gramophone recordings and compact discs. The digital bit rate
on CD is about 10 times the best rates we are now using on DAB and is
not subject to any destructive bit-rate reduction.

And that resolves to how much the compression algorithms suit teh
material being played.
I'm sure compression algorithms can be tailored for various types of
material, but the result can never be as good as something that doesn't
use any compression at all.

Lossless compression does exist.
If there is total silence, you dont need a full bandwidth to carry it..
The real point is, what is the information content?

Say you do a standard sample to say 14 bits. All the time the music/speech
is less than 14 bits deep, because its quieter, you don't need to send the
full signal.


That sounds like NICAM to me, where the data is carried in 10 bits, which
slide up and down according to volume by a further 3 bits, giving a dyanamic
range of 18 bits. BICBW

As long as you accept delay, you can use - say - delta modulation. That's
lossless, but its 'compressed', it works because you are guaranteed NOT to
have high treble energy....which is how vinyl works anyway. Its
pre-emphasised.

The ZIP algorithm works without loss of data. For example. Because there
is redundancy in data..and repetition. I applied compression to some HTML
web forms, and got 4:1 bandwidth increase without affecting anything.

The only thing you cant compress without loss is full power full spectrum
white noise.


You have to remember that all these standards were written when "cheap"
number crunching in a low cost set top box or radio wasn't feasible.


Which, in a nutshell, is my point.
Times change. Digital need not equal crap.

Argue for quality, not FM.

Write to the beeb and demand that you get 250kbps + digital radio, on
at least Radio 3 and 4...


The zip compression type standard gives a variable output according to the
data being compressed. As you say, if I gave you white noise, I guess
there'd be very little compression. A similar analogy, is to watch a film
over Freeview or Sky which has a scene of falling rain, where the picture
because unpleasant and blocky.

Yup. Ot fractal haloes rounmd DF1
Audio compression is generally fine as it anticipates the response of the
ear-brain which has characteristics we all suffer, the part we're going to
quibble over is the degree of compression which in DAB is squeezed to say
the least.

"Paul Martin" wrote in message

In article ,
DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
"Fredxx" wrote in message


DAB can be transmitted at any frequency, it doesn't have to be
200MHz. It's just what was available.

Yes, but DAB receivers can only receive signals that are
transmitting
in Band III or L-band - and there are no multiplexes in L-band in
the
UK.

Except that only the initial batch of receivers had L-band
capability.
Newer receivers are Band III only,


Just looked at the spec of some Pure products and they were Band III
only. It looks like it's gone full circle, because they started out
without L-band support in 2002/3, then L-band was added to most
receivers, but it must have gone back to Band III only.


and I'm told that some on sale can't
cope with bitrates over 192kbps.


I think the vast majority can these days - there was a bug with early
receivers in 2002, which they didn't realise existed at first because
they tested the receivers by receiving signals off air, and there
wasn't any stations using bit rates above 192 kbps.



--
Steve - www.savefm.org - stop the BBC bullies switching off FM

www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - digital radio news & info

"It is the sheer volume of online audio content available via
internet-connected devices which terrifies the UK radio industry. I
believe that broadband-delivered radio will explode in the years to
come, offering very local, unregulated content, as well as opening a
window to the radio stations of the world." - from the Myers Report

On 26 June, 14:24, "jasee" wrote:
galaxyguy wrote:

*Incidentally, concerning the

petition it is a major error that it was composed by someone unable to
spell analogue correctly. I would willingly sign any FM/AM petition
written in English. Presenting American spelling is something of a
disaster and shoots us in the foot.
Please rectify it at once.

If they did that then all the existing signatories would have to be
contacted to resign the 'new' petition, or they'd all have to be removed.

Well that would be much better than presenting something which will be
ignored because it is so badly presented. A huge percentage of people
who would sign this if it were written correctly will not sign because
they'll think its been written by an anorak airhead. I almost believe
this present petition has been written by people in favour of digital
who want to show up the signatories instead of taking them seriously.
It needs re-writing in English to attract British radio listeners to
sign it. The American spelling is not good enough and thousands of us
will ignore this. What a shame? Maybe it would be better to get in
early now before the BBC starts advertisng DAB on TV again and tell
all your friends and relatives NOT to buy DAB. If they seriously want
to hear BBC7 or 5 then there is Freeview, digital satellite and cable.
Encourage people to refuse DAB and complain about the unbalanced
adverts on 'Planet Rock'. Let's face it GCap folded because of DAB and
Channel 4 Radio failed to emerge either. FM rules OK (and AM).