7 ms·

Over 60% against ... but "more channels". OK solely money driven then. I have somewhere around 12 FM radios, ranging in price from £10 to £lots and 40 years ol

Over 60% against ... but "more channels". OK solely money driven then. I have somewhere around 12 FM radios, ranging in price from £10 to £lots and 40 years old or newer. They all still work and often give LW and SW too. In the UK at least DAB is mp2 and an excuse to put out thousands of channels at horrible bit rates. Like down to 64k streams. OK for a noisy car, terrble for at home or headphones. They all work and put out sound in sync (nb except the new denon micro system that for some reason must be using digital stage in processing fm meaning the sound comes .5s later). I often leave the radio on in several rooms when moving around, so this is especially annoying. They degrade in poor signal "nicer" than DAB and remain listenable longer. FM has infinitely better coverage across the country. For the battery powered ones they're at least an order or two of magnitude better battery life. DAB is horrific for portables.

voltagex_ 10y ago
Blah, DAB is MP2 vs AAC for DAB+. I guess that's one advantage of Australia lagging so far behind the rest of the world in radio+TV - I'm pretty sure we went straight to DAB+.
- keeperofdakeys 10y ago
  Except that for some reason Australia picked MPEG-2 for our digital TV, and so HD was almost unwatchable. Though it seems we've moved to MPEG-4 now.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if we went to MPEG2 because the original subsidised set top boxes were cheaper than the ones that supported H.264. There's some documents available under FOI (posted online) that have some further info on H.264 in digital broadcasts in Australia. Frustratingly, my TV isn't compatible, but a much older set top box (purchased to avoid silly DRM) works fine.
mycall 10y ago
Consider getting an RTL-SDR for your 13th FM radio.
dingaling 10y ago
> They degrade in poor signal "nicer" than DAB and remain listenable longer Yes, despite all the propaganda that DAB was 'interference-free' it quickly degraded into a bubbling, clicking ear-splitting cacophony when something affected the signal. Often something as simple as a person standing in front of the antenna or the bus that I was on passing some trees. We had two DAB radios for a few years but when they eventually failed we just stopped listening to radio intead of replacing them.
kagamine 10y ago
I also believe this is primarily driven by money, but also a section of Norwegian society seems to believe that anything new and shiny simply must be bought and right away. In a country in which environmental concerns are marketed as paramount by the government and media there are some obvious dichotomies emerging. For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. But ok, a solution to fossil fuels had to be found and that's it. For two, the mobile carriers in Norway are heavily promoting phone contracts in which every year you send in your phone and get the latest model phone in exchange. This has to be one of the least environmentally friendly ideas of this century. Every 12 months you exchange a phone that contains plastics and metals and is shipped from another continent just to have the latest piece of bling. Yet no-one seems to care. Another examples is that the speed limit on the motorways was raised a couple of years ago from 100 kph max to 110. So we're all burning too much fuel but now we're being told it's ok to burn more and faster. It doesn't add up. I am meant to care about the environment or not? Or does the environment only count when people can profit from it? The radio swap over is the same. It looks to a conspiracy theorist like an attempt to shame people in "old" cars into replacing them with a "see, I'm not poor!" model. There have been reports in the news here over the years about there being so many old cars on the roads and that it is a problem (it is presented as a safety and environmental problem by the govt. and media). The reason I think there are so many older cars is because new cars cost a lot mostly because tax on a new car is so high, and this leads to owners actually following service intervals and keeping cars in good condition. Finding a car with a near complete service history in Norway is common. Maybe there would be less old cars if the govt. wasn't taxing them so high. An electric car is still out my price range, even with the (now vulgar) tax breaks given to Tesla owners.
- kfk 10y ago
  I lived in DK, it's similar there (+ car tax is higher there). I think this new shiny culture is great in some regards: almost cashless society, very good tech in schools and Universities, very good IT in all companies, etc.. However, they also have the biggest contradictions I have seen so far: super old car fleet - but everybody in DK is an environmentalist; immigrants "ghetto" all over - but everybody in DK is supposed to be nice and welcoming; 80% of what they eat is junk cheap food from fast foods, but everybody in DK only buys bio products at the supermarkets. I think you just have to accept the fact that many people don't see those contradictions, our brains are made for patterns, they have a bit of a loser concept of internal coherency.
arethuza 10y ago
I agree the delay is annoying (especially for live events that you are watching - e.g. fireworks) but overall I've found DAB to be far preferable to FM. Admittedly I pretty much only listen to BBC Radio 4 which is mainly voice rather than music.
- sevensor 10y ago
  And for that matter, AM degrades even better than FM -- at least to my ear I prefer AM static to FM fading.
  - LesZedCB 10y ago
    AFAIK that's why aircraft still use AM. Unless I'm wrong about aircraft still using AM too. :)
    - sevensor 10y ago
      Interesting, did not know that. Just looked it up on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airband#Modulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airband#Modulation > Besides being simple, power-efficient and compatible with legacy equipment, AM and SSB permit stronger stations to override weaker or interfering stations. Additionally, this method does not suffer from the capture effect found in FM. Even if a pilot is transmitting, a control tower can "talk over" that transmission and other aircraft will hear a somewhat garbled mixture of both transmissions, rather than just one or the othe
hvidgaard 10y ago
The poor audio quality is a major issue for me. For some reason my ears (or rather brain) have become really good at spotting highly compressed audio. I rarely listen to webradio because of that, and only DAB with sufficient bitrate. At least with FM it didn't degrade the audio predictably, and in a way it is a far more plesant degradation. DAB+ is supposed to have solved many of the issues with DAB.

voltagex_ 10y ago

Blah, DAB is MP2 vs AAC for DAB+. I guess that's one advantage of Australia lagging so far behind the rest of the world in radio+TV - I'm pretty sure we went straight to DAB+.

keeperofdakeys 10y ago
Except that for some reason Australia picked MPEG-2 for our digital TV, and so HD was almost unwatchable. Though it seems we've moved to MPEG-4 now.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if we went to MPEG2 because the original subsidised set top boxes were cheaper than the ones that supported H.264. There's some documents available under FOI (posted online) that have some further info on H.264 in digital broadcasts in Australia. Frustratingly, my TV isn't compatible, but a much older set top box (purchased to avoid silly DRM) works fine.

mycall 10y ago

Consider getting an RTL-SDR for your 13th FM radio.

dingaling 10y ago

> They degrade in poor signal "nicer" than DAB and remain listenable longer Yes, despite all the propaganda that DAB was 'interference-free' it quickly degraded into a bubbling, clicking ear-splitting cacophony when something affected the signal. Often something as simple as a person standing in front of the antenna or the bus that I was on passing some trees. We had two DAB radios for a few years but when they eventually failed we just stopped listening to radio intead of replacing them.

kagamine 10y ago

I also believe this is primarily driven by money, but also a section of Norwegian society seems to believe that anything new and shiny simply must be bought and right away. In a country in which environmental concerns are marketed as paramount by the government and media there are some obvious dichotomies emerging. For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. But ok, a solution to fossil fuels had to be found and that's it. For two, the mobile carriers in Norway are heavily promoting phone contracts in which every year you send in your phone and get the latest model phone in exchange. This has to be one of the least environmentally friendly ideas of this century. Every 12 months you exchange a phone that contains plastics and metals and is shipped from another continent just to have the latest piece of bling. Yet no-one seems to care. Another examples is that the speed limit on the motorways was raised a couple of years ago from 100 kph max to 110. So we're all burning too much fuel but now we're being told it's ok to burn more and faster. It doesn't add up. I am meant to care about the environment or not? Or does the environment only count when people can profit from it? The radio swap over is the same. It looks to a conspiracy theorist like an attempt to shame people in "old" cars into replacing them with a "see, I'm not poor!" model. There have been reports in the news here over the years about there being so many old cars on the roads and that it is a problem (it is presented as a safety and environmental problem by the govt. and media). The reason I think there are so many older cars is because new cars cost a lot mostly because tax on a new car is so high, and this leads to owners actually following service intervals and keeping cars in good condition. Finding a car with a near complete service history in Norway is common. Maybe there would be less old cars if the govt. wasn't taxing them so high. An electric car is still out my price range, even with the (now vulgar) tax breaks given to Tesla owners.

kfk 10y ago
I lived in DK, it's similar there (+ car tax is higher there). I think this new shiny culture is great in some regards: almost cashless society, very good tech in schools and Universities, very good IT in all companies, etc.. However, they also have the biggest contradictions I have seen so far: super old car fleet - but everybody in DK is an environmentalist; immigrants "ghetto" all over - but everybody in DK is supposed to be nice and welcoming; 80% of what they eat is junk cheap food from fast foods, but everybody in DK only buys bio products at the supermarkets. I think you just have to accept the fact that many people don't see those contradictions, our brains are made for patterns, they have a bit of a loser concept of internal coherency.

arethuza 10y ago

I agree the delay is annoying (especially for live events that you are watching - e.g. fireworks) but overall I've found DAB to be far preferable to FM. Admittedly I pretty much only listen to BBC Radio 4 which is mainly voice rather than music.

sevensor 10y ago
And for that matter, AM degrades even better than FM -- at least to my ear I prefer AM static to FM fading.
- LesZedCB 10y ago
  AFAIK that's why aircraft still use AM. Unless I'm wrong about aircraft still using AM too. :)
  - sevensor 10y ago
    Interesting, did not know that. Just looked it up on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airband#Modulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airband#Modulation > Besides being simple, power-efficient and compatible with legacy equipment, AM and SSB permit stronger stations to override weaker or interfering stations. Additionally, this method does not suffer from the capture effect found in FM. Even if a pilot is transmitting, a control tower can "talk over" that transmission and other aircraft will hear a somewhat garbled mixture of both transmissions, rather than just one or the othe

hvidgaard 10y ago

The poor audio quality is a major issue for me. For some reason my ears (or rather brain) have become really good at spotting highly compressed audio. I rarely listen to webradio because of that, and only DAB with sufficient bitrate. At least with FM it didn't degrade the audio predictably, and in a way it is a far more plesant degradation. DAB+ is supposed to have solved many of the issues with DAB.