That’s a good feature. JBL you’ve done it again. I have one of their DAB radios (Tuner XL), only let downs are no headphone socket and only single speaker (another way to mask the poor sound quality on the 32 kbps stations).
Australian Govt: “digital radio technology offers higher audio quality”
Choice Magazine: “Digital radio claims to offer a handful of improvements over standard analogue broadcasts. Improved audio quality is the big hook”
How can they get away with saying this? Even Choice? What is it based on? In what world is 32kbps better sound than FM?
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The commercial’s apparently.
Look at this post from 2009 as well: “Who Will Digital Radio Appeal To?… Audiophiles – who will appreciate the improvement in sound quality, especially for music.”
???
Am I going crazy? Was it just a doublethink sort of thing where they just out-and-out lied that it would sound better and repeated it enough until it became true? Within the same article he mentions ABC Jazz will be going out as 48kbps!
The other day I was demonstrating the difference to my wife showing them the same station with headphones first on DAB+ then on FM. You could visibly see their expression of surprise at the improvement and thus realising just how bad DAB+ sound really is. They said something like, “Oh, wow. I didn’t think it would be that drastic.” So what are all these people talking about?
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Just about any Australian radio station’s internet stream has a higher bitrate than their equivalent DAB+ channel.
Sydney Morning Herald, 1992
Quite a few articles from the 90s mention “CD quality audio” when talking about a future DAB rollout. Was this the plan originally or something? Or was it always just a straight out lie?
There are also references to things like “won’t drop out anymore when you drive into an underground carpark” which is plainly untrue, and here, to driving under a bridge which also isn’t true - I guess the signal doesn’t “fade” it just disappears
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My guess would be that they expected it to be more of a transition of existing programs over to DAB rather than what eventually happened - ramming as many stations as possible into a single multiplex.
Digital TV was a pretty decent idea as well. My understanding was that Kerry Packer was the main player who wanted restrictions on multichannels, hence the original ACMA mandate of all networks carrying a HD channel and restricting multichannels to ‘datacasting’. If that had continued to this day, we’d still only have five primary FTA channels that most eyes would be on and very good picture quality even with MPEG-2.
But ram 20 MPEG-2 multichannels onto a single multiplex and you end up with each channel looking that looks like one of those early online RealPlayer videos - considerably worse than the old PAL analogue TV broadcasts.
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So one multiplex per station or something, instead of what we have now?
Digital TV does mostly look very good though, sbs world movies is outstanding while ch10 is terrible as you described. Why did it do so much better?
I expect DAB would actually sound quite good if, for example, the BBC only broadcast Radio 1 to 5 on their multiplex. But it is quite a bit more than that now - there’s something like 13 services available, of which only 3 use DAB+ encoding.
Australia started off with DAB+ which is 3x more efficient than DAB, so …but each multiplex has something in the order of 30 services on each of them these days due to the broadcasters cramming in as many services as they can. If they only carried radio services available on analogue there wouldn’t be an issue. Of course even with the cramming of services on the multiplexes, AM radio stations benefit considerably. But FM stations can often sound considerably worse than their FM equivalent.
Digital TV here now is mostly MPEG-4 which is something in the order of twice as efficient as MPEG-2, so it is possible to have all channels in HD with acceptable quality.
That being said, I still think the primary channels in HD still don’t look as good as they used to do when there was a ban on multichanneling.
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I think it depends on the provider.
The commercials all 32kb and ram as much as they can onto DAB+ spectrum that they have, but what do the ABC, Nine Radio and community stations do?
So i wonder how we have ended up in a situation where not only in 2009 do you have someone saying audiophiles will flock to hear 48kbps, but in 2025 both official government information and Choice Magazine are saying 32kbps sounds better than FM? Its like saying the earth is flat
The selling points on the official Australian DAB website are so funny. Only thing DAB actually does better out of the list is More station choice and Niche formats.
I honestly think the DAB simulcasts of high power FM stations should be shut down to free up bandwidth, I actually can’t think of any reason why people would need to listen to them over FM.
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At least I can see how they are dancing around it with “exceptional.” That’s misleading by omission. But its not an outright lie like actually saying “better”!
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Here’s ACMA in 2010 admitting that a large number of stations sound “worse than FM”:
And even this is bullshit! Looks like a study from Sweden in 2013 concluded that to match FM quality, you need 300 or at a stretch 192 kbps.
So the picture that’s forming is:
They say - “better than FM”
They actually mean - “In theory, the technology itself would sound better, due to no noise floor, IF higher bitrates were used, even though they aren’t and never will be - actually the opposite is the case, we’ll try and make things as compressed as possible which is necessary for the ‘more stations’ selling point. But since it’s not strictly speaking the technology to blame, just our desire to cram in as many stations as possible, we’re going to tell you it’s ‘better than FM’ and hope you believe it, helped along by the branding of the word ‘digital’ as something good”
Is that seriously what it is? Isn’t this fraud?
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I’ve said all along that DAB+ is quantity over quality. Also, it’s been 16 years since the first DAB+ metro services went to air and, with the exception of Mandurah, Hobart, Darwin and the Gold Coast, we still have no regional DAB+ services. I’ll be happy to never see it in Coffs Harbour.
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The official website of DAB+ in Australia is shutting down in five days.
And that website itself links to “listen live” - i.e, internet radio!! The thing which has made it obsolete! It’s as if they just want to trick people who don’t understand the difference
And the player doesn’t even work!
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I think there are (or were) a couple of Coles Radio ones in Brisbane playing music at 16kbps in mono. Sounded awful of course.
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I think some people in this thread still have the idea that it’s 1920 and everyone sits around the radio listening intently to Blue Hills or Dad & Dave.
Radio just isn’t like that anymore. Most people are passive listeners — it’s background noise while they’re cleaning the house, driving the car, or doing other things. And they’re not listening on high-end studio equipment either. For most, it’s a small radio on a windowsill, the factory-fitted car radio (which these days is so integrated into the vehicle that upgrading is practically impossible), or now an Amazon Alexa or Google Home.
If you asked 100 people whether they’d prefer more stations or better audio quality, I think at least 75% would choose more choice (and I know it’s not a strict either/or). For most listeners, the trade-off in quality just doesn’t matter because they don’t have the gear to take advantage of it anyway.
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You really don’t need anything that could be called “high-end” to be able to tell the difference between 32kbps and FM/Spotify/a decent MP3 though. The headphones I use cost $40 and the difference is dramatic. I’m not an audiophile at all and think really even 192 is fine and past 320 I stop caring. I agree that DAB+ is more tolerable when you aren’t paying attention to it though, and that most people aren’t paying that close attention a lot of the time. I recently had an Uber driver listening to KIIS Dance on DAB, totally checked out from it. Ultimately I think there is a reason DAB+ hasn’t set the world on fire and the fact it sounds terrible surely is related to that
I guess the equivalent of that is podcasts, which people still do listen to intently in the same sort of manner as they go about their day. Using internet radio. Also they would have had AM in 1920 which would have sounded better than DAB+!
Also what I still want to know is how the Australian Government and Choice Magazine can go around saying it’s “better sound quality”? I just don’t understand that. It’s objectively incorrect
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