DAB in cars

DAB signal in my wife's car is great - in our house, we can listen to hardly any stations (no BBC, patchy coverage on a few other stations) on either DAB radio, but in the car on the drive no problem at all. Point being we must be in a poor signal area and still no worries in the car.

As mentioned the sound quality is nothing to write home about compared to FM, but if you want to listen to sport it is good (5L Sports Xtra, plus no dodgy AM signal needing retuning depending on where you are, buzzing everytime you go under a power line etc)
 
HangTime said:
DAB signal in my wife's car is great - in our house, we can listen to hardly any stations (no BBC, patchy coverage on a few other stations) on either DAB radio, but in the car on the drive no problem at all. Point being we must be in a poor signal area and still no worries in the car.

As mentioned the sound quality is nothing to write home about compared to FM, but if you want to listen to sport it is good (5L Sports Xtra, plus no dodgy AM signal needing retuning depending on where you are, buzzing everytime you go under a power line etc)
Click to expand...

You saying the quality is worse than FM? Sorry if I misinterpret your comment.
Reason I ask is I was told its like comparing satellite to terrestrial TV, digital its there or not, 100% or 0% quality, where as analog can be there and of varying quality.

I've got DAB in my car but never actually tried it, I do a mainly cross country journey and the reception isn't good on FM, had assumed it would be worse on DAB and never tried. I must try it!
 
Mercenary Keyboard Warrior said:
You saying the quality is worse than FM? Sorry if I misinterpret your comment.
Reason I ask is I was told its like comparing satellite to terrestrial TV, digital its there or not, 100% or 0% quality, where as analog can be there and of varying quality.

I've got DAB in my car but never actually tried it, I do a mainly cross country journey and the reception isn't good on FM, had assumed it would be worse on DAB and never tried. I must try it!
Click to expand...

It depends on the station. I think I'm right in saying some stations bit rate will be lower than others and on some music this is noticeable, but not that much that I won't listen to the station.

Stations like Radio 1 for example has a better bit rate than something like AbsoluteRadio 80's.
 
gumpy321 said:
It depends on the station. I think I'm right in saying some stations bit rate will be lower than others and on some music this is noticeable, but not that much that I won't listen to the station.

Stations like Radio 1 for example has a better bit rate than something like AbsoluteRadio 80's.
Click to expand...

Ah ok so they degraded the signal quality when moving to digital. Compression maybe?

So stations like Kiss are probably digital to start with, or at least the music parts since they play from digit sources.
Maybe some other stations start analog and convert to digit.

Actually was just reading on the delay and that seems to back that up. There is a delay between analog and digital but some are delaying the analog to minimise the time difference, absolute being one mentioned
 
Sorry, I'm not saying it's worse than FM, just that I wouldn't write home to say how amazing it was by comparison. To be honest, without looking at the display I doubt I could tell the difference most of the time, at least not on a 'standard' audio setup.

In terms of signal, the good (and occasionally bad!) thing about digital compared to analog (and this applies to other medium like TV as well) is you normally get perfect quality, or really distorted quality, with not a lot in between. Whereas on FM, there is much more granularity. If you don't get perfect or near-perfect FM reception, I'd be very tempted to try DAB because providing the signal is good/consistent enough to get through, it should sound great.
 
The Sony one in the Focus ST is very hit and miss. The BBC stations are fine, but everything else drops out like crazy.

I wouldn't pay extra to have it over FM.
 
Tute said:
The Sony one in the Focus ST is very hit and miss. The BBC stations are fine, but everything else drops out like crazy.

I wouldn't pay extra to have it over FM.
Click to expand...


I have the Sony one in my Focus, It has only dropped out when I was in Norfolk out in the country lanes in the middle of no where. Up here in Manchester, I've never had it drop. It obviously varies where you are in the country.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom