Andrew and Lizzie

As a country, we’re in the middle of switching from analogue to digital television.  The government wants to switch off analogue radio too, and move everyone to DAB, but I think this is a bad idea — while in broadcast terms the move might be technically similar, differences in the way the media are consumed make the practical effects very different.

Consider: almost all televisions stay in one place.  Even with the ones that are portable, you usually need an external aerial to get good reception.  In contrast, many radios are portable and even those that aren’t often have a built-in (or at least wired-in) aerial — out of the nine radios we have, only one takes a standard external aerial.

For the digital TV transition, older televisions can be upgraded by getting a Freeview box which plugs into the television.  This is easy, as almost all televisions are fixed and almost all have connections to input a video signal: if not SCART or HDMI then an aerial cable.  However, adding an external box to your average radio is a lot more difficult: few will have external connections for audio input and even if they did, having to carry around an extra box with a portable radio would be an inconvenience.  Switching to DAB, then, means replacing our radios.

Also, consider that FM radio is cheap and easy to implement — unlike TV, it’s quite possible to build yourself a radio.  This low price has led to radios being put in many devices — I have an FM radio on my phone.  DAB is a lot more expensive and appears to be a lot less portable; a DAB radio costs several times more than an FM one while a Freeview box is a small fraction of the cost of a television.  FM is so ubiquitous that people have started using it to overcome the lack of other audio input (especially marketed for in-car use).  FM transmitters for audio players cost less than DAB radios.  Nokia include them in their smartphones and I’ve even seen an in-car DAB radio which re-transmits as FM, which just seems wrong.  The only reason it exists is another reason why we don’t want to get rid of FM: most cars have FM radios and many are not trivially replaceable.

From a technical standpoint, DAB sounds good — it has the potential to provide better quality audio than FM.  However, in many environments FM is perfectly adequate and in any case, broadcasters don’t appear to be able to resist using a lower bit-rate so the sound quality isn’t as improved after all.

Two big reasons, then, why we don’t want to switch off FM radio: unlike TVs, most radios can’t be upgraded and unlike Freeview, the extra cost of DAB is significantly more than the base cost of buying an FM radio.