Digital Radio

I saw that as an in store price, special tag on the shelf. May not be all stores.

Would need to buy one to check what the audio quality is like e.g is the speaker suitable for listening to talk based stations etc.

dont forget regional australia dont get digital radio yet

Yeah the roll-out to regional Australia is even slower than I could ever have imagined… Nothing even up and running in the 6th largest city in the country, the Gold Coast!

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There is nothing on the ACMA website about any progress being made on the permanent commercial and community licences for Canberra and Darwin, nor for Hobart.

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According to this document, ACMA is set to complete its East Coast allotment planning for 15 regional licence areas by the end of this month (Q3 2017-18, ie. Jan-Mar 2018).

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There are ACMA docs that quote CRA about having the GC service on air for demonstration during the Comm Games. Nowhere near close.

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Only a small proportion of that 81 page document relates to broadcasting (most of it relates to telecommunications).

Off topic, on Page 37 it Queenstown, as one market that will be consulted for a AM to FM conversion.
They seem to have forgotten there is no AM station there to convert!

Depends if the licensees play ball and there’s no Mexican standoff as seen between Brisbane/Gold Coast.

Mmm…don’t be surprised if the first regional areas to roll-out DAB+ will commence with two licence areas in QLD & one in SA.

It CAN be CD quality, but more often than not it isn’t because the broadcasters compress the absolute fuck out of the audio streams.

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There is an AM licence. They’re just choosing not to broadcast on it (because the tower was shot and no one was going to pay to fix it). I believe the translators are those assigned to the AM service (7XS) rather than the FM service (7AUS).

I imagine the new station will be simply a relay of Sea FM Devonport, the same as Burnie. Queenstown’s barely big enough to support the one station as it is.

What is the bit rate and audio format of CDs sold commercially these days?

I don’t believe a second station should be introduced. It’s too detrimental to the fragile market conditions with the one station.

Thanks.

Wouldn’t they at least have local ads, or maybe local news or sweepers, on Burnie and on Devonport, even if the programming is the same?

Same as it’s been for the past several decades – lossless uncompressed 16-bit PCM 2.0 44.1 kHz at 1411 kbps.

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Yes, they do. I think some of their voice tracked daytime content also may differ (but done by the same person) to comply with local content requirements.

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How can this be replicated on digital radio? If you run 3A error correction, you’re not likely to allocate even 128kbps for one station in AAC. How does that compare to CD?

If we’re saying it needs to be exactly the same as the CD version (i.e. lossless), there are lossless compression codecs like FLAC which can approximately halve the bitrate (to about 700 kbps) with no loss of quality. Obviously, this is impractical on DAB.

In practice, I think that 128kbps AAC would be pretty close to CD quality. Personally, I’d be happy with the audio quality if stations used 128kbps AAC.

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CD quality is debatable but 128k AAC is considered to be similar quality of 320k MP3. The way the station processes/mixes its audio is just as important.

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I thought 256 kbps AAC was considered the equivalent of 320 kbps MP3. That’s the bit rates used by iTunes and Google Play stores respectively.

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