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Comment by filleokus | Hacker News Reader

My very basic understanding is that most regular DAB (not DAB+) is inferior in audio quality compared to FM?

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.

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Techmoan did a great video covering why DAB is surprisingly crappy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27w3quNTP84

Yeah... DAB can be good, if the station chooses to transmit at a higher bit rate (which can range from 64kbit mono to 192kbit stereo at least), and signal strength is unfortunately a significant factor.

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]

[1 - http://www.wohnort.org/dab/uknat.html]

At least in the Netherlands, DAB sounds a lot better than FM, there is a massive difference in quality and sound stage.

My very basic understanding is that most regular DAB (not DAB+) is inferior in audio quality compared to FM?

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.

Yeah I think it was a combination of a technical decision to keep the CPU power requirements down and a political decision to not give people high enough quality for piracy. "Home taping is killing music" and all that.

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