The offerings on DAB are different now than what they were when it launched back in 2009, as you’d expect.
I would say the new extensions are mostly upgrades for example Stardust became Easy which has become Heart, to better compete with Smooth. MMM Acoustic evolved into MMM 70s which has evolved again to HeartHits - a Gold competitor.
The new formats have moved towards Adult Contemporary, which rates well and is safe for advertisers (except for Priceline radio which doesn’t rate at all).
I did like Koffee/ Smooth Chill but it was a very niche format which probably didn’t bring in any $$ for Nova so they’ve gone with more mainstream alternatives such as Nova Throwbacks/ Jamz and Smooth 80s/ Relax.
I do like the 80s and 90s extensions, and the Dance extensions but I’m not a fan of the country extensions. SRN should bring back Zoo at the very least, to complement Dance and Fun classic hits. It’s strange that they have left their spare capacity empty.
I believe SCA used bird sounds as a bit of a filler before they launched a new station. I remember that one on-air at some point, and I seemed to think at the time the loop was about 15 minutes long
Yeah - the ABC had “ABC Extra” which had various popups, and I think birds was one of the gap fillers when there wasn’t an event. The most common was probably sports overflows which they’ve mostly scaled back now - with streaming enough for that.
I think essentially the bits are now ABC Kids Listen. I’ve always been surprised they never just put ABC Classic 2 on there as the filler, it’s streamed the whole time but never on DAB.
I’ve got this station list from Melbourne in August 2012 with Bird Radio,
Summary
9A:
Pacific Star
1116 SEN - 64kbps
Aussie - 64kbps
KOOOL - 64kbps
3MP MyMP - 64kbps
Would be an obvious one for the ABC I think - Triple J’s offerings try to cater for such wide audiences that it really doesn’t work for any. I’ve heard some great tracks on Unearthed - it would be so much better for discovery if they were instead a few tracks an hour on a Triple J Rock station, rather than the all over the place listening experience with Double/Triple J and Unearthed currently.
there was a heap of bird tracks… its just Maestro wasnt very good at spinning them around
If I remember correctly DMG did it with one of the nova’s? 96.9 ?
Austereo just copied the idea as a filler for DAB.
Then when it was removed they actually received complaints .. some not so nice!
so it was brought back.
Some punters were very passionate about their bird channel
I also think NE is an obvious choice to launch a rock station. What would be the harm in them launching a Rebel FM like station on DAB? It’s not going to compete with either of their Nova or Smooth stations, in fact it would complement them perfectly.
Oh, 100%. I really wish radio stations here would think a bit more outside the box. There are so many genres and communities that are barely, if at all, serviced on traditional radio, where a DAB-only station would make perfect sense. You’re not chasing massive, mainstream audiences, but you don’t need to—you just need a loyal, clearly defined listenership that’s attractive to advertisers.
Two obvious examples are an LGBT-focused station and a musicals/theatre station (and yes, you could probably joke that there’s a fair bit of crossover between the two ). Neither would top the ratings, but both would deliver a highly engaged audience with strong identity and spending power—exactly the kind of thing niche advertisers like.
If you look at London, the contrast is pretty stark. There’s a huge range of niche and specialist stations there, many of which exist purely because DAB makes them viable. Obviously, not all of those formats would translate here—something like a dedicated French-language station probably wouldn’t stack up in most Australian markets—but plenty of others absolutely would.
The real problem here isn’t technology or even audience demand, it’s a lack of appetite for innovation in radio. Too many operators are still locked into a mindset of playing it safe, recycling the same formats and playlists, and hoping incremental changes will deliver growth. DAB should be a playground for experimentation, but instead it’s often treated as an afterthought or a dumping ground for simulcasts. Until that changes, we’ll keep missing opportunities to serve audiences who are clearly there and willing to listen.
One of the many many things they got wrong was in planning was the lack of DAB only community services - would help fill some of those niches if there was a process to directly identify communities which are poorly serviced and could get a DAB station.
Would certainly avoid the situation in Mandurah where there’s a multiplex allocation for community radio but no eligible stations.
In the technical thread I came up with a plan to solve DAB+
Close the royalty loophole, forcing all the filler stations to close
Remove stations that are also on FM, admitting that the low bitrate defeats the purpose
Mandate 128kbps as a minimum standard
Then you would be left with a “supplemental” service which is what we were always promised, and all those stations would sound at least okay. They could all experiment and think out of the box
I honestly don’t understand your obsession with removing stations already on FM. This is never going to happen. Why would you force people to change bands to flick between stations? It’s not gonna happen. That would actually kill DAB+ and it doesn’t happen anywhere. Also, we were never “promised” that DAB+ was a purely supplemental service. In fact just the opposite, the marketing has always been along the lines of “the stations you know, and MORE”.
Joan Warner of CRA in 2009: “We’ve learned from those mistakes (around audio compression in the UK). Our local broadcasters understand the importance of sound quality. They’re not going to be smashing (their spectrum) into tiny bit rates to get more and more stations because it defeats the purpose."
Ausgov official site, 2026 (which still also says ‘better audio quality’, which is completely incorrect)
Why not lean into this element of it and not the “more”, is what I’m saying? Let’s just admit that was bad marketing. It’s not like it’s this wildly popular service at the moment. We’ve just been talking about how stagnant it is and most people don’t even understand what it is. Every DAB+ radio has an FM option and people are using FM anyway, which sounds better. Someone in the other thread also reported that their parents were saying “Can you fix our radio, Gold 104 sounds bad” because they didn’t understand what DAB+ was and immediately recognised that it sounded worse. That says a lot to me. Like let’s just live in reality with that and also free up the bandwidth.
I’m imagining a “Switch back to FM” marketing campaign… “MUCH better sound quality… (actually correct!) No drop outs… Cheaper radios… Longer battery life….” But there would be no need for that because it would confuse most people, who don’t even know what DAB+ is!
Digital Radio has a better quality sound compared with FM and AM, but it all depends on market dynamics (ie level of competition) and how the operators decide to utilise the technology.
A case in point: SEN 1170 sounds great on DAB, better than AM. Ditto 2SM. SCA’s extensions sound very good at the current moment, but this may change over time, not because of the technical limits, but how the market is playing out.
Another case in point: Nova’s extensions sounded great on 40kbs but since Sky News Radio launched the sound quality on all of their stations has dropped significantly. I don’t think it’s only because they’ve lowered the bit rates to 32kbps but because of how competitive they are in the market.
I’d also add the ABC’s stations all sound a lot better on DAB than on FM/AM.
This study did extensive listening tests and concluded that DAB+ would need to reach 300kbps to compare with FM. It sounds worse.
ACMA in 2010 also admitted that it overwhelmingly sounds worse or “similar” in the case of most stations, and even this is extremely generous and misleading:
Anecdotally as well I once did a one-on-one demonstration of the same station on first DAB+ then FM on headphones with my wife and I immediately saw their expression of shock as to how much better FM sounded. Quote: “I didn’t think it would be that drastic.”
Chicken or the egg, is this the fault of the technology itself or that it forces the market to act in a way where it suits them to reduce bitrate? The fact that it does force competitors to lower quality means it is always going to sound bad, from what I can tell, unless something is legislated.
We currently have at least one station in Melbourne on 12kbps! That’s an insane situation.
AM stations will sound better on DAB+ because of how bad AM receivers are. Unless you have a nice wideband AM tuner, which sadly you can no longer buy. SEN in Melbourne though is deliberately worse on AM by restricting its audio to 5kHz.
I admit that maybe in Europe where they have regulated bitrates, this is true, DAB sounded pretty good there. But better than FM?? In Australia?? The only station you could argue actually sounds better than FM is ABC Classic at 128kbps and even then when you listen with good headphones they are pretty much equal IMO. Have you ever had a listen to an FM vs DAB signal with good headphones? FM sounds like it could be something playing off Spotify whilst DAB sounds like an mp3 that you’d find on an old ipod. I guess one area I could see DAB sounding better is an area like Warrnambool, where the FM commercial operators use horrible sounding audio processing. But in the current DAB operating city areas, there’s no comparison at all.
In some ways I think DAB+ is a forerunner of “post-truth.” I did a lot of research on this and even before it launched in the 2000s they were talking about how it was going to be “CD quality” while simultaneously announcing 88kbps stations. When you repeat a lie often enough, people come to believe it and actually believe they can hear better quality. I suspect it just doesn’t seem right, like it can’t possibly be true, that the new “digital” thing is worse.
In a lot of cases I don’t think this is true either. It depends on your perception I guess, this is a bit of a grey area that depends on taste but I find I prefer the sound of AM even on talk stations. We are covering ground from the technical thread but I compare it to a black & white movie on film versus a colour movie in 240p on YouTube. The YouTube video is not necessarily better just because it is “digital” and in colour. The main advantage is the lack of interference from tram lines, appliances etc which is fair enough. But if interference wasn’t an issue I would rather listen to BBC World Service rebroadcast by one of the AM stations than super crunchy and compressed on SBS Radio 3.
But that said, what SBS are doing with DAB+ is great. “More” in the sense of stations that serve niche demographics, language speakers and music genres. Fantastic. Let’s have more of that and make it sound better. Let’s give more to SBS Pop Asia what we can take away from Priceline, Chemist Warehouse Radio and Triple M or whatever.
). Neither would top the ratings, but both would deliver a highly engaged audience with strong identity and spending power—exactly the kind of thing niche advertisers like.
