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I was overjoyed when radio 1 finally got onto fm . It meant what few good songs they did play sounded good.
6 music on DAB brilliant.
Radio Caroline through the internet. Good music ,great sound quality and I can listen wherever I am in the world.....but
They also broadcast on 648 am where I’m sure the sound quality is shit.
In fact I know it’s shit, as my FB has numerous people moaning if the signal drops off and where abouts in the country they are. They have all kinds of gadgets so that they can tell you exactly what has happened to the signal. Then they also post pictures of their radios with the dial on 648.
Why not just listen in perfect quality on the internet?
Strange world.
You can get Radio Caroline on the radio?
I'm in!
People are buying cassettes again. People are weird.
People are buying skinwall tyres again. People are weird.
Fixed that for you.
FM sounds better than DAB, if you have a decent signal.
No contest.
Rusty, agreed.
My mate used to swear by Atlantic 252, mostly because he won loads of their phone in competitions, primarily I guess due to the small number of listeners 😀
🎵Longwave raaadiiioooooooo... 🎵
FM sounds better than DAB, if you have a decent signal.
Yes and no. There's two things you need to understand here.
Firstly, DAB can be broadcast at different qualities (bitrates) - think SD vs HD vs 4k TV broadcasts. Whilst DAB (actually DAB+ in the UK) is potentially superior, bit rates have to be capped to accommodate more channels. You can see - uh, hear this in action when the BBC airs its part-time sports channel, it throws Radio 4 under the bus to make room for it. So in practice FM is usually better but it really depends on the channel. I gave up listening to Kerrang radio for this reason, it was like listening to it down a phone line.
Secondly, as you say with regards to signal, FM is analogue and DAB digital. Again this is like TV: with an FM signal a crappy reception introduces noise and interference, DAB either works or it doesn't. So you might end up where a given channel in FM is broadcast in better quality than its digital counterpart, but your FM reception is worse.
FM sounds better than DAB, if you have a decent signal.
No contest.
As Cougar sez. FM might be great with a s****y tuner and a sodding great dipole antenna stuck to the side of the house, but in a parallel universe that ordinary people live in, FM is crap, particularly in a car. I have absolute, undeniable proof of this, having driven a wide variety of cars across the country from South Wales to Norwich, and from Lands End up to Liverpool. FM was unlistenable in every car that had an AM/FM radio, signal loss meant only about thirty seconds of any given song was intelligible, whereas I could set up 6Music in a car in Helston, Cornwall, and have unbroken listening pleasure for 200+ miles to my house in North Wiltshire. Except in a Mercedes, for some reason the DAB reception was as bad as FM. Two years and roughly 100,000 miles driving examples of most makes and models of car produced in the last seven or eight years proves conclusively that FM is utter rubbish, and going back even further, maybe fifteen/ twenty years ago FM was crap, I didn’t even bother with a car radio, I used a tape-only head unit or a Minidisc, because driving to Bath, a half-hour drive, would involve twenty minutes of silence after the signal vanished at Corsham. I’ve driven 200 miles in silence because the FM-only radio couldn’t hold a signal for more than a minute or two, and there was no USB input for my phone.
FM is crap, particularly in a car.
FM is crap in a car over long distances, though modern radios will re-seek national station frequencies as you go.
The latter half of your post isn't anything to do with DAB / FM technology but rather rubbish implementation thereof. The first in-car DAB radio I ever had wouldn't automatically switch between MUXes or the FM band so you were retuning every ten minutes.