DAB Radio or Sky Gnome? - DAB radio quality?

Gimpymoo · 1 Jan 2007 at 18:59

As title.

Is purely for listening to radio purposes.

Is the Gnome as good as it appears to be?

Ive read that DAB is not all its cracked up to be and an FM signal can sometimes be better due to stations being broadcast in low bit-rates, is this true?

Also, according to UKdigitalradio.com I am:

"fairly likely to receive these stations, but may need

an external aerial for best reception" with No mention of BBC stations.

Anyone else live in an area with reported "No reception" but picks up stations fine?

Alibaba99 · 1 Jan 2007 at 19:48

Broadcast quality of DAB is appalling. The bitrates are low and the codec used is not very efficient (IIRC its MP2). France, Germany and Ireland have all decided that its so bad that they will be going with AAC+ (same as Sky use for their sound) which is so much more efficient that when used at its lowest possible bitrate its quality is similar to MP2 at its highest.

The bitrates of radio stations broadcast over Sky are much higher than on DAB.

Raider · 1 Jan 2007 at 20:10

Yeah if you're any kind of lover of music, then forget DAB. Quality is noticeably worse than FM.

Freeview and Sky quality is pretty good though.

I hope they never switch off analogue FM radio

russ9898 · 1 Jan 2007 at 20:41

Raider said:
I hope they never switch off analogue FM radio

be along time before they do that due to lack of dab radios available incar.