Anybody got dab working on a c+c ? Thanks Ian
Not so much as where you live but more down to if you want decent reception as you drive around the country......If you live in a metropolis and never stray more than a few miles from home then great.....Like many things, DAB vs AM/FM will be down to practicality and thus personal preference. I guess if you live in the *** end of nowhere, it's going to be a non-starter.
Can't speak from experience in a C+C but I had a very nice Alpine unit with integral DAB tuner and windscreen mounted active antennae in the K11, which proved to be very nice and a significant upgrade over a previous AM/FM unit.
Not so much as where you live but more down to if you want decent reception as you drive around the country......If you live in a metropolis and never stray more than a few miles from home then great.....![]()
So none of your travels take you to "the **** end of nowhere" then?I drive around the England all the time on business and haven't experienced any issues. Not in my K11 or my current Skoda which has DAB from the factory.
I'm sorry for teh rant, but as an audiophile, being told that a 80kb/sec MP2 stream is the future, makes me fear for the future.
Professional musician here; my ears are not the problem."Now I'm aware of it I'm able to discern a cleaner signal with greater dynamic range when the DAB icon is showing "
Get your ears checked. DAB is terrible. It's MP2, with most stations using a 112kb/sec bitrate. Absolute 80s for example is 80kb/sec.. in MONO!! This is becoming more and more common, as stations are being split up. What used to be Virgin Radio now has it's multiplex bandwidth split into three stations, all at 80kb/sec each. Also, many local radio stations are priced out of the DAB game, meaning they aren't on DAB.
"Fitted this and tbh other then a valley with trees not had a problem yet tbh , "
And if that's where you happen to live? LOL Ever been to Wales? Lake District? Places around north Derbyshire? Drive around Hyde, or Glossop with a DAB radio and see how long it is before you pull over, rip it out of your dash and repeatedly drive over the damned thing.
Sorry, but do side by side comparisons, and the difference is shocking.
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Audio Quality comparison of PCM, DAB, DAB+, FM and AM
Audio quality comparison by Associated Broadcast Consultants including audio samples comparing audio quality of PCM, DAB, FM and AM radio.a-bc.co.uk
DAB is a race to the bottom, with more and more stations clamouring for limited space, resulting in 80kb/sec being common. Even the rare 128kb/sec stations sound rubbish. Stations in mono... 80kb/sec?.... Nuts to that. I mean, who decided on MP2? What kind of monumental idiot thought that was a great idea? On a system that was bound to be fighting for space, let's use the least efficient codec out there. LOL DAB is fundamentally at conflict with itself. Every time you add a station, something somewhere has to give. It's supposed to offer better quality and more stations, but the more it does the latter, the less it can deliver the former. This is why Radio 4 has ended up with 64/kb/sec! I know it's mainly speech, but it's TERRIBLE to listen to these days.
DAB+ is better, as that uses AAC encoding, but guess what? The UK has no plans to switch to DAB+ any time soon unlike most other civilised countries. Denmark has already switched from DAB to DAB+. The problem THERE is, is because the sound quality is better, guess what they've done? Yep!... you guessed it... reduced bandwidth even further to allow even MORE stations... and 32kb/sec is common there now. So DAB+ sounds just as #### as DAB.
Race to the bottom.
Who needs hundreds of radio stations? It's getting like freeview TV where there'a re hundreds of channels... all full of ####e, with terrible picture quality.
I'll be with FM until the bitter end. I'm all for digital broadcasting, but DAB got it wrong, and it's set to only get worse as more stations are added, reducing overall bitrates and quality year on year. Unless ALL stations on a multiplex can have 128kb/sec MINIMUM, I'm not interested.
I've not even begun to have a go at the patchy coverage yet...
It sucks.
Too many people, especially in car communities, are only interested in volume and bass... and listen to crap music, that's the problem. As an experiment I once re-encoded two classic albums at 80kb/sec - Pearl by Janis Joplin, and Amused to Death by Roger Waters. I let my 17 year old daughter listen to both, and she could clearly tell the "DAB" quality files, and said they were, in her own words... "A load of gash", but she listens to stuff on DAB and thought it was OK. Once you've heard the side by side comparisons, you'll not look at your DAB radio in the same way ever again.
Raise your standards people. If you accept crap... they'll keep feeding you crap.
Boycott DAB.
Rant over.