People are probably listening to DAB in their cars without knowing that is DAB. They go to radio in their car and there is a list of stations to choose from. You don’t have to tune it in like old radios unless you specify that mode. Most people wouldn’t do that so if people don’t understand what DAB is just say listen in your car by selecting Smooth Relax on your car radio and leave DAB out of it.
yeah i think its a case of “scan stations” and pick one, or most likely find the one you had in the previous car. I know my in laws brought a new car and the first thing they did was scan stations and pick classic fm.
if people stumble across the DAB+ exclusive stations they may think they are streaming anyway = perhaps the car has a built in sim card that they missed in the paperwork or something
I think in most cars you still have to scan AM, FM and DAB separately… I doubt many can scan all 3 like that in a single press of a button?
For instance, in my Mazda, if I select “Station List”, it will only list all of the main receivable stations for the band that I’m currently on eg. it will list FM only if I’m listening to FM at that time.
The ‘Favourites’ list is cross band, but you have to set up that manually by going into each band and saving each desired AM, FM or DAB station as a ‘Favourite’.
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I’ve had two hire cars recently (a Hyundai and an Audi) that group the DAB and FM stations together all in one tab, so you just pick the station from a list. It means you get two "Triple M"s next to each other (the FM version and the DAB version), as well as all the filler stations. But yes, it makes using DAB fairly seamless once you hit the radio button.
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Bingo. People are used to modern technology giving more choices. Some brands of TVs come with additional streaming channels that seamlessly fit into the same list as the FTA channels. So many people just don’t understand the nuances of Wifi/Cloud etc that anything new like that they don’t think too hard about how it comes about. Getting a new car that magically has DAB and a bunch more stations could easily fit into that category. Even if they know they need to push the DAB button to get them, they don’t stop to ask what DAB is or what it stands for. Most couldn’t even tell you the difference between AM and FM except that AM doesn’t sound as good as it for “old” people!
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Yes in my car I can SAVE DAB, FM and AM stations together in a list, but I still have to SCAN for them separately at first by choosing DAB. It’s a pain. I recently showed a friend what the DAB button actually meant in her car. She’s had it for 3 years and only ever scanned FM to find stations. Needless to say she was impressed, but she would never have found it on her own.
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That’s precisely the problem, there is no broad awareness at what DAB actually is, so when people go to Radio in their cars they just hit FM or AM.
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MY i30 does DAB and FM togther and AM seperate. even favorites are shared between DAB and FM
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The best I heard was that their new car has a radio with “those extra digital channels” which is a good enough explanation.
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Agree, similar to how Digital TV was first promoted (even though at first only ABC & SBS were allowed to run extra channels).
I suspect some people still think their radio is ‘digital radio’ simply because it has an electronic/digital readout for the AM/FM frequency and (in the case of FM) can display RDS. As opposed to the old days of radios having a rotary knob or slide rule display to change stations.
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That’s exactly how they sold digital TV! And should have been how they sold DAB to the public.
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that’s what many, many people still think digital radio is. It’s been hopelessly sold by the industry and ACMA.
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My 2021 Hyundai i30 doesn’t have DAB. Not that I’m missing anything in my part of the world, lol.
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Magic 1278 has sounded extremely distorted and delayed on DAB+ in Melbourne this morning. No problem on AM or via the net.
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are you sure? all 130’s produced after 2018 for the aussie market have it
Magic 1278 is sounding very ordinary at times. Way too much audio processing. And distortion on voice peaks. Especially during news and weather.
The Doors’ Riders On The Storm was unlistenable the other day. The softer parts of the song were brought up so much that when the loud parts came along, the whole lot would plummet in level. I heard the same track on MMM 70’s and it sounded fine.
The levels are hitting some part of the audio chain so hard that it sounds like the DAB+ stream is about to
Break up at times. I actually prefer listening to muffled and mono AM when it gets like that.
Makes you wonder if anyone with a decent set of ears ever monitors the sound off air.
Also intriguing how Magic and 3MP have much higher audio levels on DAB+ than most other stations.
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I can 100% confirm it doesn’t.
Is yours the ‘Go’ variant, as I recall that was the only i30 released that didn’t have DAB+, but I think all other variants from the Active up, did have DAB+.
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The distortion overnight that I mentioned was way worse, it made the program completely unlistenable and unintelligible. Presumably a technical fault.
However, it was back to normal this morning.
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Yes, I think it was only the very base model that didn’t have it in that year.
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