You’d be surprised how few people can tell the difference. I dip in and out of some live event work (church and school kinda stuff). Someone can give me a terrible sounding MP3 that’s been compressed and re-compressed multiple times. I’ll go and find a FLAC version (or at least an HQ iTunes file) and play them both - often they can’t tell what the issue is, even if you start explaining it.
There’s no way in the world AM in 1920 sounded better than DAB+. That’s hyperbole.
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Way for them dodge having to pay Royalty fees on their instore radio is what I have been told, not sure if thats true or not
Hence the very low bitrate so they are “radio stations” but don’t take to much DAB bits
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Similar to all the DAB streams on the Gold Coast and Hobart to reduce royalty for Listener streams.
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Choice Magazine talked about the “environmental benefits of DAB+.”
And yet the reality is a billion-dollar supermarket giant using additional electricity to blast their instore music all across town in unlistenable quality on a station they know nobody will listen to, just to save on having to pay artists slightly more. Sounds dystopian to me
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Oh, AND the supposedly more environmental approach involves:
- never replacing AM/FM, but adding something on top of it involving more consumption and resources
- everyone having to buy new radios when they have existing AM/FM radios from decades ago that work fine
- those radios consuming electricity much faster, and;
- often having lithium batteries that are built-in and cannot be replaced.
Sorry if I seem obsessed with this, I’ve just decided to write a zine about it because this is so fascinating and it’s been so under-discussed. It’s a forerunner of “post-truth” and of an Elon-like approach to technology. I’m using this to kind of share exasperated ideas and see what people’s reactions are
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I’ve been told that it’s a bit of a loophole that there was some interest in trying to close - each store needs to have an APRA licence (to play music in a ‘public’ space), but because it is from a commercial supplier, they can buy cheaper licences.
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Even on 16kbs , they sound much better since the DAB technical upgrades done in 2021, not long after the ABC upgraded the sound quality of their DAB line up.
This is what 16kbs sounds like on a station here in Melbourne, in my opinion worse than a good sounding AM transmission.
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Yeah geez… what is it with the letter “S” sounding so bad? It doesn’t compress well or something. Makes it hard to listen even to talk stations.
3MP and Magic are constantly flogging DAB+ in their promos. I don’t think they understand how much AM is part of the appeal.
Outside of radio enthusiasts and tech nerds, I don’t think anyone is actively rushing out to buy a DAB+ radio. For most people, digital radio just arrives by default — when they replace the old kitchen radio, buy a new car that happens to include DAB, or upgrade an alarm clock or speaker. It’s rarely a deliberate purchase decision driven by excitement about “digital radio” itself.
A big part of the problem in Australia is that the industry has done a pretty poor job of explaining what DAB actually is, why it’s better, and how it’s different from a standard FM/AM radio with a digital frequency display. To a lot of consumers, “digital radio” just sounds like a confusing technical label, not a meaningful upgrade.
If this were handed to me as an assignment in a marketing degree — “create a marketing plan for digital radio” — the first thing I’d do is drop the term digital radio entirely. It’s abstract, uninspiring, and doesn’t communicate benefits. I’d rebrand it as something like HD Radio or a similar consumer-friendly name, and lean heavily on comparisons to the transition from SD to HD television: clearer sound, more stations, extra information on screen, and a better overall experience. That’s a story people already understand — and it’s one the radio industry here has largely failed to tell.
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But that would be misleading since “HD” implies better quality, when it’s actually a significant downgrade. “Clearer” is also often incorrect, I mean two posts above we’ve got proof it often doesn’t hold up to AM. I dont think its a coincidence that the public haven’t shown much interest in something that’s bad
OK! We rebrand DAB+ to HD Radio.
With the instant boost in sales thanks to this amazing marketing pivot, we begin finding out that some people are disappointed that they can’t tell the difference between ‘HD’ and AM/FM.
It turns out they’ve purchased HD Radio receivers which are only compatible with the US IBOC standard rather than the DAB+ standard which is well established here.
Some people have even purchased XM Satellite radios thinking that this is even better than HD Radio. And are befuddled by the fact that that shit don’t work here.
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I suspect your inflicted with this as Nova Ent don’t operate in Hobart, so have to dump it somewhere….
Also….Can you tell me if Hams are on special at my local Coles for Christmas please…HA!
i’m not saying it needed to be HD radio - it just needs to be a better name than “digital radio” - people see that and assume that because the radio in there car has a digital display its a digital radio and that causes confusion
I agree they did an appalling job at explaining what DAB was when it launched, and ever since.
In my opinion they should have explained it as just an additional band with a LOT more stations. Eg. Now there is AM/FM/DAB not just AM/FM
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Isn’t the only thing that actually applies to DAB+ here in Australia more stations? FM has cleaner sound, RDS info and a better overall experience.
Also, it’s not just nerds that pick up on poor audio from DAB+. My parents asked me why gold 104.3 sounded so bad in their car, turns out they were listening to the DAB version (since FM and DAB are combined into one list on their new car) and were very happy once I switched them back to FM. DAB compression just doesn’t deal with music well, it turns all the drums/cymbals to mush in a very unpleasant way, something that is noticable even on the cheapest headphones.
I feel like if you’re gonna cram as many dab stations onto a multiplex as possible (like Australia is currently doing), you should ONLY advertise the extensive station choice and variety, plus how it better caters to other languages and niche content. Market it as a companion for FM, not a substitute. Do not mention the better sound quality and on screen info since most consumers will feel missled after trying out DAB and seeing that these are outright lies.
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OK team, so I’ve been researching this and this sort of talk has stood out to me - this is from The Australian in 2008:
”A consistent theme of discussions about digital radio at the conference was a fervent desire not to repeat the mistakes of the launch of digital television.”
What are they talking about? What mistakes? I’m actually asking, I was a teenager throughout the 2000s and what I basically remember is: they launched digital TV, it did actually look and sound better and had more channels, we stuck it out with analogue for a while but then by the time they turned it off everyone had got around to getting a digital TV. Nobody ever complained after that that analogue was better, then after a certain amount of time it became retro/nostalgic and gained a certain charm that way. I feel basically the same about my memories of the transition from VHS to DVD.
Incidentally I also remember digital radio coming in, and this is my memory of it: I heard about it for a few months, and then I never heard about it again.
So what were the “mistakes” they’re talking about with digital TV? I really don’t remember anything like that. Actually just recently I rewatched Kath and Kim and that is set around the time of the analogue to digital TV transition. Unintentionally it is a time capsule of that moment in media history. There is a “Kath goes digital” episode and the premise is that she’s addicted to it because there’s more channels and it looks better.
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Hahaha, check this out - from The Age, 18 June 2009:
“We keep getting tarred with the digital TV brush,” says the boss at Commercial Radio Australia, Joan Warner. “People are saying: 'Nothing much happened with digital TV in the first three years. You say you’re going (to push digital from the outset)? Yeah, we believe you’… We’ve learned from those mistakes (about 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.”
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