At Christmas I acquired a DAB radio.  How I came about it was that I wanted to get Jayne a mini/micro stereo for the kitchen to replace the ancient and ailing ghetto blaster there.  When I went to the shop I found they were giving away a portable DAB radio ‘worth’ £50 with the model I had decided on.

The inverted commas are because a portable radio is not worth £50 to me because there is no way I would fork out that much for a small radio, but as a freebie you can’t really go wrong, so I now have a Sony XDR-S55DAB but I can’t really see what all the fuss is about.

I have never fallen for the argument that you get better sound quality.  I know full well that DAB is capable of acceptable sound if a high enough bitrate is used for a channel, but I also know that a lot of channels are put out at much lower bitrates, many of then in mono, so sound quality is not a selling point for me.

What does appeal to me is the increased range of channels, with BBC 1Xtra, BBC 6 Music, Planet Rock, and all sorts of other niche broadcasters.  I like the fact I can now have Planet Rock in the shower if I want.

What I was not prepared for was how much DAB drains power.  I know that I was only using cheap batteries – the sort of poundshop specials that are in the house for Christmas emergencies – but even so, this radio takes four AA batteries and they were dead after a couple of days of light bathroom use.  FM radios seem to last for ever, and they give some warning of dying by getting fainter: digital, as you would expect, is just suddenly not there.

I should have anticipated it, knowing that DAB is not just receiving a radio signal but then doing all the processing to decode the signal and convert the MP2 stream into audio, but even so…  it made me rethink my plans to have 6 Music and Planet Rock available on future camping trips!

The idea that digital must be better because, well, its digital is the great modern fallacy.  I remember seeing telephone answering machines with proud marketing boasts that they were digital…  all that meant was that instead of recording on tape with a full(ish) audio spectrum the messages were compressed to death to fit on a chip.

Maybe DAB+ will turn out to have better sound quality and be less power-hungry?  Maybe when (if?) the old FM stations start disappearing there will be more space in the radio spectrum to allocate more bandwidth to channels?  For now its great to get the extra stations, but hardly economical.