I'm just wondering where all this is going to end. After being given a Ferguson DAB (with somewhat limited sensitivity) radio a few years ago, i was happy enough with what i heard to invest in a Roberts radio that pulls in several muxes.

Then came DAB+, effectively obsoleting my expensive Roberts, so i bought a nice little budget Altius and all went swimmingly until changes were made in February. Suddenly, one Saturday at work, the 5Live football commentary changed to "bubbling mud" and Sports Extra took over. Retuning gave me two Sports Extras and no 5Live. Now, in the last couple of weeks, i'm suddenly getting the same with Radio4 and R4x.

Maybe Altius isn't such a well known brand, so now what? If i go down to the shop today and invest in another "reputable", say, Sony DAB+, do i find that just down the road they will introduce DAB++ or whatever and make that one obsolete, too?

Big boys, small boys, whatever, can't they just agree on one standard and stick to it before we're faced with either filling our houses up with obsolete radios or just binning the bloody lot and giving up on DAB altogether?

The BBC mux does not use DAB+ and unlikely to use it for a long time, so your Roberts is not obsolete (unless you want new stations Fun, Magic Chill or Jazz FM on DAB+ outside London).
Presume you still have the Ferguson and Roberts sets, is the Roberts OK on the BBC stations as it could be either local interference or a fault on the Altius?,

Current DAB and DAB+ will be around for a long while.
There is a new modulation method DVB-T2 lite tested in Denmark for radio but unlikely to be used for radio.
There is a codec xHE-AAC which is being used in digital radio mondiale DRM which overcomes problems DRM has, and only used in India and is struggling there, has been tested in Norway on online streaming, and technically existing sets should take the update, but is very unlikely to be used in Europe DAB+.
http://www.audioblog.iis.fraunhofer.com/xhe-aac/

Have you tried using the "prune" option to remove inactive stations? That might get rid of old versions of the stations and then you should be left with the correct ones.

This does sound a bit like the problem that used to occur when Radio 4 split into two (or was it three?) every morning. My clock radio would completely lose all stations for about a minute, whilst emitting a strange whine as if it was struggling. Then normal service would return until the same time the next morning. Clearly a fault in the radio's software.

Thanks for the information and the reassurances. I had the impression that "normal" DAB was going to be superseded by DAB+. A factory reset and full retune of the Roberts gave me back a 5Live and Sport Extra split, though curiously there are two Sport Extras, one of which is inactive.

There must be a generic problem with the Altius radios then, because my son has one, too and it's similarly affected on 5Live/extra. My son uses his Altius in Denmark and it works well there. Perhaps they are imported radios originally meant for mainland Europe. both Altius radios, by coincidence, started this glitch just at the time when new stations were being introduced, so i thought that the BBC engineering bods must've been doing some tweaking at the same time.

The R4/R4ex problem has mysteriously fixed itself. Possibly i was trying to listen when they'd split R4 for the Daily Service as the Roberts sometimes glitches at that time, in a similar way to Inkblot's clock radio.

Wohnort notes that when on air, BBC R5LiveSportX exists both as a Secondary Component of BBC Radio 5 Live and as a Service in its own right.

Out of curiosity, how are Jack and Jack 2 promoting their transition to DAB+ to listeners, if anything, on the Surrey and North Sussex multiplex?

Haven't listened for long periods, it's still plain DAB and there doesn't seem to be any DAB+ promotion so far.

I listen a fair bit on and off. They are currently running trails saying that everyone [doubt it!] is on holiday & the breakfast show is back in September.

Maybe they will wait until then. The on air links tend to be fairly non location specific but I'd be surprised if the team do live on air announcements as the FM and DAB listeners in both their 'home city' of Oxford and other areas would be confused. If they do anything at all, I'd expect some pre recorded Surrey inserts (which we know is possible from ads, Jacktivities and travel).

I'm pro DAB+ but I'm going to be sad if it sounds unlistenably bad below 48k. I can't bear the 32k stations in the car, sounds terrible. Whilst prametric stereo doesn't require many more bits, there's no point in having a stereo station which is only really useful in the car, if it is going to sound terrible - in the car!

The Ofcom variation says Jack can go 40k and Jack 2 32k on Aug 1, and as Gerry said did not happen and on the website an Facebook pages no indication when it will!

Going mono will do very little. If anythong, it'll do jack (see what I did there?). Unlike with joint stereo and as you identify, there'll be little to gain and more to lose. To improve the audio quality, you ultimately need to be adding 16-32kbps to the bitrate. Tweaks a la Jazz FM will help but it's more like a plaster on a gaping wound. Regardless, Jazz FM's promotion of going national is based around going in stereo. Reverting to mono would be a humbling retreat and send the wrong messages to the industry.

Absolutely. The extra 2 or 3kbps saving from the parametric stereo won't make much difference. Jack is clearly a popular station and is digital only in Surrey. I have no issue with it going to DAB+ in the slightest, but to make it unlistenably bad in the car is a bit silly. There are other ways of listening at home and to be honest, at low volume levels on a kitchen portable, the artefacts are more tolerable.

By all means drive (ha!) DAB+ forward, save money and free up capacity for other services, but don't make it unlistenable right where it matters. 48k should be the minimum for music DAB+ (I know Arqiva/SDL wasn't offering this for D2). I'm not so bothered about Jack 2, the rotation is very high and Eagle 3 and other services are similar enough but Jack does stand out a bit and will be quite gutted that the race to the bottom is carrying on.

Half rate sampling would help too.

DAB+ has four sampling rates. 16kHz, 24kHz (half rate), 32kHz and 48kHz. I converted some high quality music on my Linux PC using the Fraunhofer FDK AAC encoder at 27,400bps (the net audio bitrate for a 32kbps DAB+ stream) using 24kHz sampling. It sounded AWFUL. Throw your headphones off and never listen again awful. 32kHz is a much better compromise but still sounded flat in places.

Most, if not all of the minimuxes seem to use 32kHz sampling for the 32kbps services be they mono or stereo.

Surely the sampling rate is more than half the final audio top frequency, so 32khz will give a top frequency of about 15khz about the same as FM, less than a CD but OK for most music.
24 kHz sampling will give only about 10khz which will sound muffled for most music but as the encoder has less artefacts and can sound better on some music.
For Jacks output it needs audio of at least 15khz and using 40k DAB+ bandwidth should have lower artefacts than the other stations who use 32k.

http://www.a516digital.com/2016/08/a...n-germany.html

What a contrast with the UK, where the BBC has never broadcast a single programme in DAB+ and the shelves are cluttered with obsolete DAB-only radios.

There's vast amount of wasted capacity on local muxes but none bothers to have a DAB+ barker channel to let people check whether their existing radios can receive it (and to reject their shiny new radios if they can't !)

Try explaining to the average man on the street the difference between not getting a station because your radio doesn't support DAB+ (i.e. listed and silent); because they are outside local coverage (i.e. not listed); or because they auto tuned the radio in one location and now it's in another one can't get it (i.e. listed and silent until it possibly retunes to Absolute, a particular problem in retail sheds where the signal is blocked), or because there radio is being dumb and trying to decode it from the Derbyshire multiplex which is too weak to provide any audio, instead of the very strong Nottingham multiplex (i.e. listed, silent, and possibly some scrambled audio).

Such a barker doesn't really help too much, especially not now Jazz FM, Magic Chilled, and Fun Kids are available in most of the country.

If you are having such a service the only sensible home is BBC National DAB, potentially using the precedent of BBC Red Button 2-7 on Freeview - i.e. only available on newer equipment - to make a part time service which is a barker at other times - e.g. broadcasting some of the online only coverage on "BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra 2 on DAB+ "

You know what will happen.

Despite the existence of BBC Red Button channels which require a DVB-T2 device and Internet connection to view, there'll be cries of "why are the BBC launching new services using DAB+ and denying licence fee payers with DAB only radios access to these services they have paid for!!!".

There is little complaint about the use of frequency blocks outside of 11B-12D, the switch of 2K to 8K on DTT, the requirement for DVB-T2 and Internet connectivity for BBC services on DTT yet introducing DAB+ services draws ire and protest. Incredibly odd.

We're told Internet Radio is the future and that data allowances are not an issue, yet in Germany:

"...all without eating away on data allowances typical for internet radio on the go."

And if you think the UK mobile phone networks are expensive and stingy for data allowances, wait until you see Germany's data allowances and prices. You'll appreciate why DAB+ is being promoted as an alternative for news, travel, weather and sport information as well as radio on the move.

Depends what you call a contrast. If you read the article you will see that neither DAB nor DAB+, which has been in use for 5 years, have been successful so far in Germany.

Some people would say that DAB/DAB+ haven't been successful in the UK.

After a fifth of a century, less than one third of listening is via DAB/DAB+, nearly a fifth of new cars are sold with analogue-only radios, and half the stations are mono !

Sounds very similar to the situation with VHF FM after a similar period.

Yes, but many people including me still listen to most of their radio (Five Live) on the MW/AM band! The whole thing is a mess, has been a mess for decades and given the way things are run, that ain't gonna change any time soon including for DAB/DAB+/whatever.

Not really, VHF/FM radios were initially very expensive and required a rooftop aerial. All the early ones used valves and it was some time before affordable FM transistor radios became available as the early germanium transistors could not operate at high frequencies. FM only had three stations BBC Home, Light and Third. Luxembourg, which was very popular then, could be received on readily available cheap AM portables which sold very well. The fact that reception was poor and the quality abysmal didn't matter, Luxembourg had the music we wanted. Soon after that pirate radio, also only on AM, kept the cheap AM portable radio market alive. FM took off when an international change in frequencies forced Radio 2 off the AM bands and on to FM by which time AM/FM radios had become affordable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva...y_Plan_of_1975