Digital Radio Mondiale, a Better Standard Than US-Adopted IBOC?

Gsparky2004 writes "Over at Engineering Radio, Paul suggests that Digital Radio Mondiale (or 'Digital Radio Worldwide') may be a better alternative than the US-adopted, proprietary IBOC system. But he's concerned that the FCC is too far down the 'IBOC is the way!' road and won't accept an open source alternative, even one that may work better." For a slightly more pointed take on the matter, check out this anti-IBOC site, which paints IBOC as something akin to the devil himself.

Comments

Wow! Amplitude Modulation!

[Ecuador]

RTFA, it seems the fight is over the AM band! Interesting, given the fact that I am over 30 but still I don't remember a time when anyone cared about the AM band...

The Anti-IBOC site is an interesting read.

[ProdigyPuNk]

Seems like these guys really know what they are talking about. Not only are they criticizing a position - they actually back it up with a bit of science. It really is disgusting to see any proprietary format, complete with royalty payments, forced by the government onto the populace. Makes me hate Clear Channel, et. al. even more.

Re:The Anti-IBOC site is an interesting read.

[theaveng]

Your color TV is proprietary (developed by RCA in the 1930s and again in the 1950s). Ditto your radio (FM also developed by RCA) and your VCR (developed by JVC) and your CD (Sony/Philips) and DVD (DVD Consortium).

I don't see how that has destroyed society. Do you? On the contrary NTSC-I and NTSC-Color and FM and VHS (but not SVHS or DVHS) are all patent-free and open standards that benefit citizens everywhere. Eventually ATSC and HDR will be open too (around 2020).

Does anyone care either way?

[Tx]

From where I sit, digital radio is a solution looking for a problem. In the UK, the BBC spent vast amounts of license fee payer's money (i.e. my money) investing in new DAB (the digital radio standard approved over here) stations. Then when it found no one was listening to DAB, and private stations were bailing out, rather than give it up, they spent more vast quantities advertising the f@*k out of DAB to try and boost take-up. And yet still I can count the number of people I personally know who own DAB radios on the finger of ... well, one finger, actually. It's four times as expensive to run a DAB station as an FM station, the coverage is worse, receivers are expensive, and the benefits are minimal. From what I can tell, both IBOC and DRM may suffer mny of the same issues as DAB, although maybe the US market for radio is different enough that it will work out differently.

Re:Does anyone care either way?

[grahammm]

Another problem with DAB in the UK is that, like with Digital TV, there are too many stations/channels on each MUX. If they did not have so many channels (why do we need so many +1 channels on Freeview Terrestrial Digital TV?) then they could use higher bitrates and therefore better quality. DAB has the capability to offer higher (audio) quality than FM but because they squeeze in so many stations, the quality of most (if not all) is lower than a good FM setup.

Always something new

[Brad1138]

There is always going to be a new, better technology if you just wait a few minutes, but they have to pick something at sometime. If you wait because there was something better around the corner you would wait forever.

Re:Always something new

[AK Marc]

My real question is why can't the US follow international standards? We'd cut a good bit of costs if we just worked together with everyone else and adopted international standards. Instead, the US companies push Congress for incompatible standards so that they get some protection, at the expense of inferior products or inflated costs and racist nationalists whine about New World Order and will gladly accept (and push for) incompatible standards because they don't want to do what they are doing in those socialist countries.

Re:Different, not necessarily better.

[ProdigyPuNk]

True, but at least with hybrid DRM you aren't stuck paying outrageous royalty fees to a company backed by your big-station competitors.

Re:Why does this still exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 54; I grew up listening to radio. It's now been about a decade since I last listened to radio, even in my car (first switched to CDs, then mp3). Wouldn't the bandwidth be better utilized by wireless data at this point? Streaming digital broadcasts could easily replace the small number of broadcasts that remain (e.g. sports, news, religious, top40). As an extra bonus, the broadcasters/advertisers can actually tell if anyone is listening.

I am female, I do not use the Mens Room, why do they still exist? The space would be better used for expanding the Ladies Room.

Re:Different, not necessarily better.

[pottymouth]

And there's a damn good reason to maintain an analog system of broadcast... inexpensive, plentiful, ubiquitous radio's that can be used for communicating with the population should something terrible happen. Like a Marxist regime in the White House, Oh wait....

IBOC is broadcaster protection

[Animats]

IBOC was designed to prevent broadcasters from competition. One of the alternative schemes was to use spread-spectrum across the entire AM broadcast band, on top of existing stations. This would make the "properties" of incumbent stations far less valuable.

It's worth keeping analog AM as an emergency broadcast medium. The receivers are simple, dumb, and reliable, and the transmitters have huge range. That's useful during floods, hurricanes, and such.

I would much rather they use AM Stereo

[PotatoHead]

Yeah, it's analog, yeah it's noisy like analog is, but it has a great, simple, warm sound.

When talk / news / sports are broadcast in AM Stereo, the impact in your car is really sweet! In car listening to that kind of programming is pleasant, and the lack of higher frequencies, combined with the separation possible on AM, makes for a very unobtrusive and comfortable listening experience.

There isn't anything else like it.

Re:I would much rather they use AM Stereo

[iammani]

I think you would be interested in my Noise Generator cum Equalizer that can turn any good quality FM/MP3/FLAC audio into AM quality audio.