Their line of synths is great, but a radio which doesn't support DAB? How am I going to listen to 6music?
Also, and I don't know how much it has decided their design decisions, but Teenage Engineering is Swedish based, and here DAB hasn't really become a thing.
It's been, more or less, in a "trial" state since 1995, not covering the whole country and steps to upgrade to DAB+ and replacing FM canceled a few years ago.
Broadcasters can divide the ~1,000 kbit/s into many channels, usually 9-12. It's rare for a single channel to get more than 128 kbit/s, so a strong FM signal might sound better.
In the UK, the BBC stations tend to be pretty solid, the commercial stations can be somewhat bad, although a lot of the commercial music stations seem to have shifted to DAB+ (predominantly 40 kbit/s DAB+ Stereo HE-AAC v2 apparently - presumably to fit more stations in, ~10 on the BBC ensemble vs ~20 on the commercial "National 1" ensemble).[1]
Many cars still ship with no digital capability.
Ordinary FM makes reasonable sense here.
They should do well with that thing.
The answer was "it exists and has been ramped up for a while". And I'm not even talking about SDARS.
When they run ADS on the HD streams, we will know it is much closer.
Some regions are almost there. Many are not.
Its been nearly two decades since HD Radio was chosen as the standard in the US, and yet in 2018 still nearly half of the new cars sold had only regular analog radios. Nearly 20 years and HD Radio was only on less than a fifth of all cars on the road. http://www.insideradio.com/more-than-half-of-new-cars-now-eq...
The rest of the world has the DMB vs. DAB competition driving the adoption, and technical improvements, while USA still had the same HD Radio of 10 years ago, and near no mobile receivers.
We could have had a much quicker, cheaper system.
Then there is the whole artificial highs above about 8khz thing...