DAB (aka Eureka 147) is 'Digital Audio Broadcasting'. It's the digital radio standard used in most of the world save the US where although trails were sucessful suffered from the 'not designed / made in america' problem that resulted in American mobile phone technology being a few years behind the rest of the world. DAB uses compression to squeeze multiple channels with data (and pictures if desired) into a single channel. Because multiple channels can be broadcast from a single transmitter it's main advantage is in transmitter sharing which allows one company to broadcast the full set of channels knowing that it's competitor is doing the same. In the US this was one of the main failures of the trails as transmitter sharing caused too many lawers to step forward. You can read a bit more about DAB here, http://www.worlddab.org/ . Quality is not always better than FM when many stations are squeezed into a single channel. The BBC in Britain comes under criticism for this a lot, especially when it droped Radio 3 from 192 to 128 bit compression and the loss of quality which came from it and broadcasts Radio 4, 5 and World Service in mono on many occasions. A new DAB+ service is presently undergoing trails in most of Europe presently.
The article writer here, however, seems to imply that those who want DAB are better off ditching their iPod's in favour of a combined unit. That is a foolish position. If you have an iPod and a collection of AAC files from iTunes and/or are happy with an iPod, why should we ditch it for a combined player? Is the same argument to be applied to the many FM receivers for iPods too?
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DAB (aka Eureka 147) is 'Digital Audio Broadcasting'. It's the digital radio standard used in most of the world save the US where although trails were sucessful suffered from the 'not designed / made in america' problem that resulted in American mobile phone technology being a few years behind the rest of the world. DAB uses compression to squeeze multiple channels with data (and pictures if desired) into a single channel. Because multiple channels can be broadcast from a single transmitter it's main advantage is in transmitter sharing which allows one company to broadcast the full set of channels knowing that it's competitor is doing the same. In the US this was one of the main failures of the trails as transmitter sharing caused too many lawers to step forward. You can read a bit more about DAB here, http://www.worlddab.org/ . Quality is not always better than FM when many stations are squeezed into a single channel. The BBC in Britain comes under criticism for this a lot, especially when it droped Radio 3 from 192 to 128 bit compression and the loss of quality which came from it and broadcasts Radio 4, 5 and World Service in mono on many occasions. A new DAB+ service is presently undergoing trails in most of Europe presently.
The article writer here, however, seems to imply that those who want DAB are better off ditching their iPod's in favour of a combined unit. That is a foolish position. If you have an iPod and a collection of AAC files from iTunes and/or are happy with an iPod, why should we ditch it for a combined player? Is the same argument to be applied to the many FM receivers for iPods too?