Petition to stop FM being switched off

In article ,
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.

--
*Stable Relationships Are For Horses. *

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

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
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.


DRM at a decent bitrate knocks DAB at a decent bitrate into touch

Steve Terry

The message
from "Steve Terry" contains these words:

====snip====

What we need is more compression to recreate a greater bandwidth,
with DRM that's what you get

Forgive me if this seems a daft question, but how does DRM (Digital
Rights Management) create greater bandwidth?

--
Regards, John.

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

Johnny B Good wrote:

Forgive me if this seems a daft question, but how does DRM (Digital
Rights Management) create greater bandwidth?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale

--
Adrian C

"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
.. .
The message
from "Steve Terry" contains these words:

====snip====

What we need is more compression to recreate a greater bandwidth,
with DRM that's what you get

Forgive me if this seems a daft question, but how does DRM (Digital
Rights Management) create greater bandwidth?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale

Mpeg4 compression radio

DAB Mpeg2 ;-p

Steve Terry

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message

In article ,
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.


Stop lying Plowman. You only ever listen to Radio 4, and you've said
numerous times that you never listen to the music stations which just
so happen to be the stations that have the biggest problem with their
audio quality on DAB.


Of course if you want to compare 'good' FM to poor
bitrate DAB to make a point, so be it.


Don't need to do that - FM ****es all over DAB.



--
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

"DAB sounds worse than FM" wrote in message
...
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message

In article ,
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.

Stop lying Plowman. You only ever listen to Radio 4, and you've said
numerous times that you never listen to the music stations which just so
happen to be the stations that have the biggest problem with their audio
quality on DAB.

Of course if you want to compare 'good' FM to poor
bitrate DAB to make a point, so be it.

Don't need to do that - FM ****es all over DAB.


FM ****es all over the lousy low bitrate DAB we get in the UK

Steve Terry

"Fredxx" wrote in message

"Kráftéé" wrote in message
...
DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
"Alan" wrote in message

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/

Please sign. Thanks.




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


What you say is wrong for the following reasons:

* The Digital Britain report said that the FM band would be used
for
"ultra-local" FM stations once all of the bigger FM radio stations
have been switched off. So FM actually isn't planned to be
switched
off, so the FM band couldn't be freed up for DAB anyway

* DAB uses frequencies of around 200 MHz, whereas FM uses
frequencies of around 100 MHz - i.e. DAB couldn't be transmitted
in
the FM band anyway

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.


The bandwidth for DAB and FM aren't much different.


* DAB won't be getting any more spectrum than it's already got,
because DAB spectrum was all allocated to Europeam countries in
2006
(there is one unused DAB channel at the moment that was going to
be
used for a 2nd national commercial multiplex which fell through
when
Channel 4 decided against entering radio last year, but I think
that's just going to be pretty much wasted when they replan the
spectrum)

* Apart from in London, where I think the figure is around 55
stations, people can typically receive about 35 radio stations on
DAB. DAB could never carry hundreds of radio stations. DAB was
designed in the 1980s. It is an incredibly inefficient system
because the technologies it uses are so old.

Some other things that you might like to bear in mind which it
sounds like you're probably unaware of at the moment are that

* DAB provides lower audio quality than FM, Internet radio and
radio
via digital TV

* DAB's audio quality isn't going to get any better in future
because the MP2 audio codec it uses is 20 years old so they've
obviously been optimising it for years but it still sounds crap at
the low bit rates that it's used at in the UK

Agreed - DAB bit rates are embarrasingly low. I have no idea why
MP2 was
chosen.


They held listening tests in 1990 at Swedish Radio where they compared
a load of codecs and boiled it down to 2, which went on to become MP2
and MP3. They chose MP2 because - get this - MP2 provided higher
quality than MP3 at high bit rate levels - above 192 kbps basically.
Also, MP2 decoders have a lower computational complexity than MP3, and
MP2 allowed lower error correction coding with a computational
complexity as well. In 1990 when electronics were extremely slow and
expensive compared to today the difference in computational complexity
might have mattered, but it was a bad long term decision. And as for
the decision to go with MP2 because it provided higher quality than
MP3 at high bit rates that was an even worse decision. What they
should have done IMO was implement MP3, which was designed to be
backwardly compatible with MP2 anyway, then let the broadcasters
decide. What they did was cripple the whole system by adopting MP2 -
and the fools didn't even bother to upgrade the codec since even
though AAC was standardised in 1997, and development of it began in
1994. Basically, it's a textbook lesson of incompetence.

Apparently the BBC R&D dept were recommending AAC to be used in the
late 1990s, but the BBC execs obviously ignored them.


Even DAB+ isn't compatible with old DAB. All in all, a complete
mess!


It's definitely a complete mess - the fact that DAB+ had to be
designed just 3 years after the BBC had properly launched DAB in 2002
shows how incompetent the broadcasters were in choosing to go with DAB
without upgrading it first.

To be fair to them about DAB+ though, DAB+ was designed to solve DAB's
problems, so they added the AAC+ audio codec to make DAB more
efficient and added RS error correction coding to make receptino more
robust - but DAB receivers produced up to that point didn't support
AAC+ or RS coding, so they had to accept non-compatibility.




--
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

"Alan" wrote in message

In message , DAB sounds worse
than
FM wrote
"Alan" wrote in message

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/

Please sign. Thanks.




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


What you say is wrong for the following reasons:

snip

So there is no need for the petition! FM isn't going to be switched
off.


The only FM stations that will still be on FM will be "ultra-local"
stations, which most people don't care about.



--
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

"Steve Terry" wrote in message

"Kráftéé" wrote in message
...
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 we need is more compression to recreate a greater bandwidth,
with DRM that's what you get


Where are you getting this stuff about DRM from? A typical DRM station
is the BBC World Service, which transmits in a 9 or 10 kHz bandwidth
channel and it uses a bit rate of about 20 kbps. The audio quality is
so bad that it makes DAB sound good in comparison, and I consider the
audio quality on DAB to be dire.

If you really mean DRM+ then that's a different story, but DRM without
the + is a crap, low quality system that's only really meant to
replace MW stations. And DRM doesn't stand a chance of getting
established in the UK now, because I don't think there are any
receivers in teh shops that support DRM - if there are any there's
only one or two.


--
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