The January Sales are a wonderful thing: yesterday I picked up a Ferguson R116D DAB digital radio for half price at Dixons.
I’ve been considering a digital radio for a some time. Some people claim the quality is lower than FM and punters would be better off listening via the Internet, or using a Freeview digital television box, but since a good portion of the stations to which I listen regularly (e.g. Virgin and Radio 5) are broadcast on AM-only, it seemed to make sense. I also really like good old-fashioned radio — I can operate it even before I’ve had coffee in the morning, and without the distractions associated with turning on my computer!
So far, I am really pleased with it. There are a lot of digital stations available, even in our basement, and overall the quality of the stations we like is pretty good but bizarrely many of the rubbishy commercial ones do seem to broadcast in 96kbps mono — come on people, this is the 21st century!!!
While audiophiles criticise DAB for the poor audio quality of many stations, for me this is pretty moot since this is a cheap set with only two 1 watt speakers (but it does have line-out which is missing from many cheaper sets and therefore one of the reasons I chose this one). However, I do think DAB has a number of advantages over FM, namely tuning into stations is considerably easier, and the digital display gives all sorts of extra information such as the currently playing song.
Another advantage of this model over many others in its class is that it allows up to 10 DAB and 10 FM stations to be stored as presets. While tuning is easier than FM, having only 4 presets for each of DAB and FM would have quickly led to an argument in this household!
Not a major problem, but after a few weeks of usage I’ve decided the lack of visual feedback on the volume control is rather annoying.
“broadcast in 96kbps mono — come on people, this is the 21st century”
They do this because there’s no room on the multiplex for any more bandwidth, not because they’re choosing to! The multiplex owners prefer to cram on as many stations as possible (more money!) rather than having fewer stations at higher quality. Now, when analogue radio finally gets switched off, this may change, but by then we’ll probably be expecting 5.1 surround sound radio
Exactly — so this leads to the main argument for the adoption of DAB as being “more choice” rather than higher quality. This would be a fine arguement if DAB quality was at least as good as FM, but if you are happy listening to your FM stations, and will continue to listen to those stations on FM because the quality is higher, where’s the incentive to upgrade? This lower quality will also lead to greater resistence to analogue being switched off, so the extra bandwidth will never become available…
Does the Ferguson come with an alarm function? I’ve been thinking about getting a DAB but I want it as a wake up alarm in the mornings, and I need it to have this function. Having seen this one at £50, I was thinking about getting one, but I need to know if it does this, cheers!
It doesn’t I’m afraid. I thnk they have another version that does come with an alarm, but it wasn’t a feature I was interested in so didn’t look too closely at it. –HTH, Nathan.