Digital TV - help!

[ducasi]

I think the technology can deliver decent quality if the bandwidth is there.

Definitely, though they're always unlikely to use sufficient bandwidth to actually get the same quality as is possible with analogue FM. (But this is the old vinyl vs CD and CD vs MP3 argument all over again though...)

I think the biggest problem with digital radio is that it doesn't cope well with poor reception – most radio listeners are in cars, and many of them in big cities or rural areas, both places where reception can be very variable.

I like my Bug - I can record to MP2 (on an SD card) and listen later. Only snag is that expensive MP3 player like iPods don't read MP2 format - so I need to buy cheap and nasty MP3 players which do.

Not sure I realised that. Is DAB based on MP2?

[DavidY]

I think the biggest problem with digital radio is that it doesn't cope well with poor reception – most radio listeners are in cars, and many of them in big cities or rural areas, both places where reception can be very variable.

I remember reading an article years ago when digital radio was first being developed, when they were demonstrating how the reception was so much better in cars than an equivalent analogue signal. I think they had two transmitters with the same signal and drove away from them in a car with 2 radios - the digital signal was still audible many miles further away than the analogue one. Don't quite know why this translates into poorer digital reception when they started doing it for real. (Weaker transmission strength or too much being multiplexed into one channel?)

Not sure I realised that. Is DAB based on MP2?

I think so - according to this anyway. A Bug will play MP3s but doesn't record to MP3 on the SD card. You can convert MP2 to MP3 but it's a pain and I've yet to find a utility which can cope when the BBC switches the bit rate in the middle of a recording. Cheap MP3 players can cope with this no problem though.