DAB is sub-standard?

[as4]

Tomorrow (Dec 1st) RTE officially launch six Digital Radio (DAB) stations. They've been available for the past while as test transmissions, but what is the story here? The quality is SHITE!!

RTE Pulse Windows Media Stream:
http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/live/radio/1112.asx (points to mms://streaming.rte.ie/wmtencoder/1112.wma)
which is a:
wma2 stream at 16bits, 44,100 Hz, Stereo but at 48kb/s it sounds like shite - harsh grating digital smear all over the shop.

RTE Pulse Real Media/Real Audio Stream:
http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/live/radio/1112.smil (points to rtsp://live1.rte.ie/redundant/1112.ra at this time of typing)
which is a:
realmedia/cook stream at 16bits, 44100 Hz, Stereo but at an even lower 32kb/s? It sounds even worse.

What this means is the windows media stream is about a 29th of CD quality and the real media stream is down to just over a 44th.

Now, someone tell me this quality is ONLY for online listening, and the real DAB transmission is better quality when recieved on a DAB radio. I hope to god that's the case coz if it ain't - DAB is dead and buried before it's even launched here.

Someone put me right, willya?

[Dunbar]

Yea what he said =)

[playthatbeat]

Yup - DAB sucks balls for quality - just like JPEG pictures, DVB Digital Telly, DVD discs, MP3 files and CDs themselves..

Digitisation is an APPROXIMATION of the reality.. The more you process it, the more approximate it becomes.. Also, the alogs for compressing the mp2 streams are not too smart - even to this day.. The audio in RTE is all based around the 48k 256 stereo mp2 format (aka .s48) - so everything has to be ripped to this format for inclusion on the playout systems.. The VERY BEST you can hope for is that a CD (.wav) is converted to mp2 - this includes a regrade from 44.1k to 48k, and then reconverted and encoded for DAB on the fly, then re decoded at your end.. thats 3 conversions processes minimum. 4 if the master wasn't 44.1k stereo!

If you take the average show that is pre-recorded in the home studio enviroment, and transported as a high quality mp3 - you can add another layer or 2 of conversion in there, with random results.

So, now you know.

Also: enjoy article from teh GUARDIAN yesterday, who have a media section on mondays that specialises in bitching about DAB and other 'emperor's new clothes' nonsense that will kill us if we use it..

[as4]

The VERY BEST you can hope for is that a CD (.wav) is converted to mp2 - this includes a regrade from 44.1k to 48k, and then reconverted and encoded for DAB on the fly, then re decoded at your end.. thats 3 conversions processes minimum. 4 if the master wasn't 44.1k stereo!

I'm told in the UK, DAB quality was made even worse again by squeezing more streams/stations into the spectrum as the gov tried to maximise licence revenue.

I won't be going near DAB until the analogue switch-off Thanks for that.

[playthatbeat]

Yes, this is the case.. We have 2 muxes on the air in ireland - 1 for the Indie stations, and 1 for RTE. The RTE one is haevily biased to favour LYRIC FM, as this plays audio that requires extra quality.. The others get a bit of a raw deal, donating bits to Lyric.

The Indie Mux doesnt have any favorites, they all sound equally grainy/brittle to me..

Speaking of ropey quality - have you seen TV3 on Sky or Digital Cable recently? PUMPY AUDIO AND SLOW RECOVER ALC or what?

Also, i notice the bitrate of alot of the channels on SKY has been reducing to make way for the awesome HD services!!!! Soon the regular DVB services will be so shitty in quality, that HD will look AMAZING!!!

HD == DAB == BETAMAX == BUY THE SAME SHIT AGAIN

[Armer]

?

What a load of bollox if you ask me, I'm not Impressed

[brain]

Yes I will add to the bollocks thread. Am aware of meetings in montrose concerning this and the comment from someone who knows, that the dab is so shit and stop trying to lie to the public, that the fm off-air signal is far superior. There was a stunned silence, acknowledging the truth hurts.

Same over here, we have DVB-T tv and its smearovision,, the VHF relay or sat feed is waaaaaaaay better.

Fuck Digital-- full on.. 404

[playthatbeat]

I'm quite sure that Full Uncompressed Digital (like Some Laserdiscs, DAT, DigiBeta etc.) are all very good indeed, but even then they are inferior to delicious unclamped Analogue.. Same goes for Sound sources of all types - analogue for the win every time.. But, when you introduce Compression & approximation and Masking into the mix - you take a step BACK in quality from the strict confines of uncomressed Digital.. So, ANY service that compresses and incurrs a loss, sucks donkey dick.

We all marvell that there are now 300+ TV stations on satellite if you have SKY / Canal+ / DirectTV, a good trade for the 30-or-so on cable, and 6-10 on UHF/VHF we had in the days pre-digital - Innit COOL????? - No, not at all, because of the new 270 services, about 30% are reloads of old analogue output, and the rest is SHITE and compressed to hell to squeeze in all said Shite.

DOUBLE FAIL

[playthatbeat]

Horrible thought: Since 95% of FM music radio now uses some horrible PlayOut system - for which the CDs are ripped and compressed and stored for playback, even if we DO stick to Ye Olde Analogue FM, it's only 2 layers of conversion better then DAB

The best we can hope for these days is to have the jock play a CD - and since CDs are Digitised crap anyhow, this is a pre-fail from the very start!

In an ideal world, DAB would have ~1000 kbps rate so as to compare to .wav/CD - and it should be fed with .WAV sources (or .flac) digitally & losslessly mixed, then Digitally linked to the transmitter chain.. That would make for some comparable quality to having the CD right there with you..

Sad point though: when Digital Takes over totally (in 2012) we will never again be able to experience uncompressed broadcast media

Sad point 2 though: most radio & tv has been using Digital mixing desks for years, so even the analogue radio we THINK is analogue, has been digitized at least once before we hear it.. Sure, it's 24bit, but still, it's only an approximation, and always will be..

Sad point 3 though: the first time i did a show using a digital mixing desk i could feel the lag, and as more & more parts of the Chain have gone digital, the lag has grown.. Think about it like the difference between live programmes and the feed on the web - there is a delay, and even though this delay is <1 second in the case of studio--FM, it's still a hint that something sinister is going on before the sound gets to you - SOMEONE OR SOMETHING IS STEALING OUR QWALITEE!!!!

Sad Point 4 then: most people have grown up on grainey and brittle audio played back on piss-poor picnic players with teeny speakers and Solid State 5w-per-channel amps.. So they never knew balls-out quality, and don;t even KNOW how cheated they have been.

GOD BLESS LASERDISC, D2MAC, PAL+, VINYL, 8-TRACK, BETACAM and METAL TAPE

[mccabema]

Tomorrow (Dec 1st) RTE officially launch six Digital Radio (DAB) stations. They've been available for the past while as test transmissions, but what is the story here? The quality is SHITE!!

RTE Pulse Windows Media Stream:
http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/live/radio/1112.asx (points to mms://streaming.rte.ie/wmtencoder/1112.wma)
which is a:
wma2 stream at 16bits, 44,100 Hz, Stereo but at 48kb/s it sounds like shite - harsh grating digital smear all over the shop.

RTE Pulse Real Media/Real Audio Stream:
http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/live/radio/1112.smil (points to rtsp://live1.rte.ie/redundant/1112.ra at this time of typing)
which is a:
realmedia/cook stream at 16bits, 44100 Hz, Stereo but at an even lower 32kb/s? It sounds even worse.

What this means is the windows media stream is about a 29th of CD quality and the real media stream is down to just over a 44th.

Now, someone tell me this quality is ONLY for online listening, and the real DAB transmission is better quality when recieved on a DAB radio. I hope to god that's the case coz if it ain't - DAB is dead and buried before it's even launched here.

Someone put me right, willya?

Most of the DAB music services are 128kbps-the interweb streams are low to compensate for the piss for bandwidth we have in Ireland.

[as4]

Most of the DAB music services are 128kbps-the interweb streams are low to compensate for the piss for bandwidth we have in Ireland.

That's what I'd hoped for and that makes sense, however over time the temptation will be to take that lower to fit more streams on a mux...

[playthatbeat]

Yup - that is where we are heading - crush them in to make it appear better value! Check out the SKY satellite channels, they used to be watchable, but now there are 300+ channels of utter shite up there, the good stuff suffers to make space.. Now on most of it you can see blocking in the darker parts of the screen, and random movement in stills.. The killer is when you have a fade to black in an area - you can see Contour lines - like on a map as the colour fades to black!! Yuck..

More in the papers last week about DAB sucking balls.. I have to say, alot of it was nonsense.. I won't go into all the points, as some were valid, but there was one very stupid comment, prooving the Journo had no clue - he/she/it claimed ".. a big problem with DAB is the time it takes to change channel - on FM it's instant, while on Digital you wait, sometimes up to 5 seconds, for a signal to decode.." - this tells me the hack here has a shit radio.. My JVC in the car (an addon module for mah headunit, about 2 years old..) flips instantly on DAB, even when changing Mux from the RTE one to the Indie one.. FM on the other hand, changes channel slightly SLOWER! Especially if the stupid AF is enabled, then it hops all over the band trying to find a stronger version of the channel.. Okay you might think, but NOT in the case of Yesterday FM and 2FM - as they each have 5000000 frequencys, and each one sounds slightly different - oh god wat a mess..

For added meh, i enable the DAB/FM backup function - where if the DAB signal drops, it falls back to the FM, and if the DAB is available, it auto-switches to it if i select an FM station first - this leads to NOT ONLY the AF changing frequency on FM and me getting the volume-up-volume-down, stereo-width-in-and-out as it jumps, but the delightfull ECHO as the DAB cuts in delayed a second ot 2! Lol!

Speaking of Which, as we have already established SKY are making the quality of it's channels worse then ever to force us into buying HD boxes, could it be that FM radio is being made sound shite so DAB sounds better???? WOULD THEY DARE???? 2 thoughts on this: [1] - yes, it's a conspiracy, they do it to make us spend more money on new shit we don't need - [2] - no, but what is the point in fixing something that will be discontinued in 3 years anyway? - either way, we, the consumers, are fuc*ed.

Amusing footnote: I was offered a Pirate DAB transmitter 2 weeks ago, it was SCPC + Data (1 channel), 45w, USB port which enabled it as an external sound card on any PC or MAC - 600euro delivered!!!! This, my friends, is the future..

[brain]

DAB is total fucking shite: And Sky, crushem up tv. As for journalists, theyre whores as it stands with no fucking clue.
FM sounding worse than DAB, like in "V" when Brian Dennehy saiys "earhlings we come in peace", fUCK OFF LOL...

No DAB here, I hope it dosent get off the ground, the FM signal is a relay from the satellite feed which is 256K (Like the Germans) due to the terrain. Not that anyone wants Slovak Radio on their DAB in Dublin but at least the FM is Win. They even had the old Russian std FM signal on 69 and 71mhz in unbelievably good quality and full bandwith. OIRT roll on..


Back to my 8 tracks, fuck Digital full on.


404

[as4]

Confirmation that we said it wasn't worth a shite to ya

And 9 months after blanking DAB here, the papers reveal how shit it is, but more interestingly how RTE are still gonna pursue it.

From an article called Questions remain on future of DAB radio in the finance section of yesterday's Oirish Toimes:

"[RTÉ Suit]... dismisses concerns about poor audio, claiming listener experience is better with digital radio"

Fuckin' LOL at this guy! The head on him! In fairness, he appears to be pushing for an upgrade to DAB+, thereby acknowledging the dog's dinner of it all. As it stands, here's a breakdown of the real picture.

* 2,614,400 Irish people listen to radio
* 2,580,400 on analogue radio
* 15,000 on mobile phone
* 8,000 on a digital music player
* 7,000 on teh interwebz
* 4,000 on "any other digital format" which, ladies and gentlemen, includes DAB

OMFG. Less than 4,000 people use DAB.

FAIL!!!

Well all of us said here it was shite, and that was even before it was launched.

Those Nooz links again for the non-believers:
Questions remain on future of DAB radio
Digital radio growth slow - BCI

Jesus. What a waste.

[playthatbeat]

And the Papers were full of the big indie station heads all enuffing DAB, using the 'DAB 2 is the win' spoof.. this, of coarse if utter nonsense.. DAB2 is simply the same shite, with a more modern compression scheme.. one that offers THE SAME QUALITY AS DAB IN LESS BANDWIDTH - which opens up the possibilty of upping the bitrate and making it sound a bit better then plain old DAB..

The 'additional services' that are part of the DAB2 standard are no more then data inserted into the freed up space made available by the smarter compression.. Hey wow - lets have a large RSS feed with every channel, so we can hold our portable players up infront of us and read stuff as we listen to unrelated audio, or even better, stare at the LCD in traffic while listening to unrelated audio - hell yeah!!!

Digital delivery methods ACCROSS THE BOARD have simply made the average quality for the consumer more average.. the lowest levels of quality of video, audio are much improved from the analogue days of old, but the HIGH end has dropped in quality to meet this.. It's supposed to be good for the basic user, but i have to ask, if you are listening to radio on a 1-speaker ghettoblaster in an echoey kitchen, who gives a fu*k if it's got no hiss?? If you are watching TV on a smeary laggy 14-inch LCD screen, who cares if it's 100Hz? Ditto for CRT tube TVs and Car Hifi - once you add the background (road/family) noise and other distractions, it's all a waste of time..

THE ONLY people who would appreciate this supposed improvement in quality that Digital media offers are serious audio lovers - and they all know that ANY digital representation of audio or video is merely an approximation of the reality, and they all sneer at DAB with it's poxy compression artifacts and thin sound. The BIG mistake with the marketing of DAB was claiming it's as good as CD.. First off, CD aint that good, and 2nd off, it's fuc*ing IS NOT NEAR CD BECAUSE CD IS NOT COMPRESSED YOU LYING CU*TS!

So, the indie stations are running a mile from Digital rollout, because they basicly have no balls, and less cash to be pissing away on providing services.. You see, you MUST man the service, because research has shown people do not listen to robots.. Take MUSIC CHOICE EUROPE as an example - they used the Astra satellite to sell a music service to people in the 90's, and they ran a robot for every taste: jazz, rock, polka - they all had their own station with little or no human presence, and they sucked so hard, they turned blue, then inside out, then fell down a hole, never to be seen again... So, to offer '10 times the choice', you need 10 times the people and 10 times the content, and in the current climate, the person who does this, is the looser.

So, what will happen to the Digital changeover? Well, something overlooked so far is the lack of provision for re-allocation of the current broadcast bands (AM and FM).. Nowhere has anyone said that once the digital is the norm, the old FM and AM will be flogged of to private radio (taxis etc.) - the actual plan is to let FM become the place for COMMUNITY stations.. so, FM will be the home of special interest!! Er.. wait, hang on, so the ACTUALLY INTERESTING AND WELL TARGETED AND SPECIAL STUFF WILL REMAIN ON FM?????? well, there you have it.. there IS NO PLAN to axe our FM radios, and therefore there is NO gun to anyone's head to change or upgrade or whatever. so, enjoy your FM radio, but be aware of the hidden fail:

In the early 70's, FM and stereo kicked in, and the quality was at a premium.

* anlaogue media (records & 1/4inch tape)
* analogue mixers
* analogue processing
* analogue links to transmitters
* analogue exiters and power-amplifiers (valves!!)
* analogue transmission
* analogue reception
* analogue amplification (user)

Year-on year, each of these stages became cheaper to manufacture, and this made things smaller, cheaper and safer, but it also LIMITED the quality with every advance.. By 1990, we were fuc*ed - quality was secondary, and now we find ourselves in the land of approximation: EVEN IF YOU LISTEN ON FM USING A SOLID STATE RADIO AND AMPLIFIER WITH MONSTER SPEAKERS YOU ARE BEING DICKED BECAUSE THE AUDIO YOU ARE HEARING IS SOME DIGITAL CRAP - at best it's a CD, dithered thru a digital mixer, processed by a bit of code and then re-constituted into analogue sound for transmission..

So, in actual fact, over the years, we have been undergoing a REDUCTION in the quality of our broadcasting, which eventually will make DAB and DVB-T seem attractive because it cuts out a layer of de-compression/re-compression..

How sad. Sounds like a bible story. And it all COMMERCE RELATED, with the end-user quality secondary to commercial gain...