CA's talking at inappropriate moments

Nope. Marketing are in charge of which bits get talked over. There is no such place as "Presentation", at least, not in London.

Ah yes, the Marketing department. Were they also responsible for cramming more stations onto DAB at the expense of quality, and also the bigger DOG on BBC 3?

I'd say the DOG would certainly have been a Marketing decision, though I suspect the number of digital radio stations the BBC started is probably somewhat outside their remit.

Yes, I can't understand why people sing the priases of DAB. From my experience, the sound quality is poor. I read it's MP2 at something like 128kbps for stereo & 64kbps for mono (Mono???). I wouldn't listen to an MP3 at 128kps, so why should I listen to a radio station using an inferior codec?

Initially, the BBC used some extremely high bitrates for DAB and it sounded fabulous. I think now only Radio 3 is broadcast at 192kbps. Radio 4 does indeed get wittled down to 64kbps mono at times. It's shocking that the BBC have such little regard to quality now. Look at the picture quality on digita. Again, initially it was terrific, but with the driving down of costs from the set top box manufacturers leading to cheaper quality components, plus the insistance of the broadasters of squeezing as many channels as they can into their allotted bandwidth means that now a good analogue reception is far far better than a digital one in many cases.

do they have a very small spectrum for DAB or something? Taking into account how many decent quality stations they fit onto freeview you'd think DAB would be much better

Surely it could be written into the programme licence?


Ruddy Marketing - the root cause of all what's wrong with modern pres. Couldn't Mark Thompson have made them redundant?

I remember reading something about some sort of form that gets submitted and you were allowed to write NO EPG on the credits info if there was a pre-rec anno on it or something else.

Surely this would apply in these circumstances and the top gear team should have bunged this onto their form

I'm only aware of one instance where a voiceover was specifically prohibited by the programme production. I think it was the first of the returned Auf Weidersehen, Pet... but I could be wrong. It definately had Jimmy Nail in it though.

Well, I've comapred FM & DAB and in many cases FM sounds superior. I can't beleive they are pushing DAB when the quality is so poor. Heavily compressed, using a poor quality codec (why use MP2 when there's much higher quality ones?) and not even all in stereo. It's a step backwards really. Just like a decent quality analogue picture looks much better than digital, decent quality FM is better than DAB. Both though, would beat analogue hands down if they weren't overcompressed. Digtal TV at 6Mbps & Radio at 256Kbps would be excellent. Instead we have TV which can be as low as 2Mbps and radio between 64 and 128kbps

The BBC has a single DAB multiplex operating on a single frequency nationwide for non-regional services (*). This is a fixed amount of data - so the more stations you squeeze in simultaneously - the lower the bandwith you have for each one.

In some countries (like Germany) music stations go out at 256k, the BBC use 128k for many of theirs, with Radio Three getting the best rate (usually 192, though I think this can be dropped at times)...

BBC Local radio is usually guaranteed carriage on commercial regional DAB multiplexes - though these may not co-incide neatly with BBC editorial boundaries (and I don't believe there is a requirement to carry multiple BBC services)

(The DAB system allows for "Single Frequency Networks" - which allows multiple transmitters to be operated on the same frequency for nationwide coverage. It is hoped that the UK DTT system will be upgraded after analogue switch-off to allow this for TV as well.)

Entering into the spirit of this thread. Anyone care to recommend a system of colour coded LCD displays so a listener is able to decide if the TX encoding on DAB is up to their expectations.

E.G "Oh, this is a blue programme, that means it's 64k. I am SO not going to listen."