DAB radios Buyer Beware

musa

YOU Start.



Subjects to be included,
Is FM better quality?



If you have more than one radio in the home (Made by different companies) are they likely to have different processors and therefore to be "Out of sync?"Why are there signal tests from Auntie with transmission of future data transmissions including pictures,
(BBC radio 4 yesterday)?

L1011

"Is FM better quality" - This is -entirely- down to someones judgement, as well as FM signal quality. Additionally, from personal experience, same radio - Irish DAB is across the board better processed than UK DAB, so UK experiences aren't particularly valid here...

L1011

..and as goes the sync - theres two main chip makers, Imagination and Radioscape. But my FM radios don't keep in sync!

byrnefm

Really? I thought all FM radios decode the same signal simultaneously. How strange!

L1011

byrnefm wrote:

Really? I thought all FM radios decode the same signal simultaneously. How strange!

Well, considering some of them are software defined, it would be somewhat hard to be precisely accurate to an analogue one. My Nokia N-Series doesn't stay in sync with my JVC car radio, or anywhere close in fact.

watty

the "sync" depends on size of DSP ram buffer essentially. "Better" ones might have MORE delay.

DAB can be better than FM, or worse. It depends entirely on the settings used by Broadcaster. But for same spectrum/bitrate, DVB-h, DRM or DAB+ delivers better quality than DAB. DAB is obsolete and few countries are adopting the UK standard as originally in the Eureka project.

ALL DAB radios are in a sense SW defined. They all use dedicated DSP HW, unless it is DAB SW running on a PC with a dumb tuner head. Very few FM radios use DSP. Some might have DSP audio processing. All DSP needs a RAM buffer, the size and clock rate depend on what you are doing.

musa

watty wrote:

the "sync" depends on size of DSP ram buffer essentially. "Better" ones might have MORE delay.

DAB can be better than FM, or worse. It depends entirely on the settings used by Broadcaster. But for same spectrum/bitrate, DVB-h, DRM or DAB+ delivers better quality than DAB. DAB is obsolete and few countries are adopting the UK standard as originally in the Eureka project.

ALL DAB radios are in a sense SW defined. They all use dedicated DSP HW, unless it is DAB SW running on a PC with a dumb tuner head. Very few FM radios use DSP. Some might have DSP audio processing. All DSP needs a RAM buffer, the size and clock rate depend on what you are doing.

Would be a help if you could plug an active antenna in,or would it?

L1011

watty wrote:

ALL DAB radios are in a sense SW defined. They all use dedicated DSP HW, unless it is DAB SW running on a PC with a dumb tuner head. Very few FM radios use DSP. Some might have DSP audio processing. All DSP needs a RAM buffer, the size and clock rate depend on what you are doing.

I was talking about my Nokia and JVC -FM- radios, but you're still accurate