Global Radio axes all regional/local breakfast shows

Sunshine Ludlow is also on FM now, largely covering Ludlow.

"The early indications are that Goldmine is already getting a decent audience for a DAB startup, and what's more, it's getting a 35+ audience, when the normal demographic for a golden oldies type station would be 45+. That means that it's already looking more appealing to local advertisers"

Source for this? Are they really getting a decent size audiance? I don't think they are in RAJAR and RAJAR won't release figures from January 2019 for a few months yet. 931 people likeing a facebook page does not mean it has a decent sized audience.

Source is a contact I have at the station. They’ve been very surprised by the level of support they’ve received already, from listeners, and they are looking to increase the live output as soon as they feasibly can.

"Source is a contact I have at the station. They’ve been very surprised by the level of support they’ve received already, from listeners, and they are looking to increase the live output as soon as they feasibly can".

What are terming as a 'decent sizes audience'?

I wouldn't expect a business to say that they're performing badly.

Goldmine broadcasts at 56kbps mono LSF MP2 on DAB in Cornwall. Unless you really like your music to sound like it's coming from the end of a cup on a string, this station really won't be giving Bauer's new acquisition in Pirate FM or Heart Cornwall any issues.

Considering this is a DAB only station, rather than FM, expectations were between very low and non-existent. What would be considered decent for an FM station, would be considered stellar for a DAB station. So whatever your expectations would be, at least halve them and maybe halve them again.

Stand alone DAB stations haven’t got the best record, NJOY Radio in Cornwall being the one that springs to mind. NJOY didn’t really know what they were. Goldmine has a much stronger sense of what they are trying to do, which is a much better starting point for a radio station.

Oh for goodness sake, do you really expect any brand new radio station to go straight to challenging the market leader? If it ever happened it would be freaky as hell, but you have more chance of blue snow in August happening than that.

And, most people don’t care about the sound quality, I know that hurts your audiophile heart, but frankly, it’s not the sound quality that matters, it’s the content, and yes, it’s early days but already things look vaguely promising for Goldmine and I wish them all the very best.

To be fair Ian, the sound quality does bother people. I'm no audiophile, crank the Optimod up I say, but the sound quality on some DAB stations is precisely why I don't believe in the format and never will. Indeed, with headphones on, the 80k mono and below stations actually hurt my ears because the sound is so fatiguing.

It's why I've been dead against the station I part own going on small scale DAB. If you can't do 128kbps Stereo, don't bother.

It's why I'd shut down so many of the Bauer brand extensions in order to get Kiss, Magic, Absolute and a hypothetical national Gem in decent quality national DAB

Even 128k stereo is pretty crap when it's only MP2.

It's not too bad these days thanks to encoder improvements.

You can probably get the ex-Wyvern flavour of Free Radio in Ludlow pretty well too?

No amount of encoder improvements will make 56 kbps MP2 acceptable. DAB+ on the other hand if the Cornwall mux would be more acceptable. The trial small-scale multiplexes unlike local TV have been successful on the whole, providing niche services of which some have been in DAB+ at lower bitrates.

If I was to listen to this Goldmine set-up, it'd be online only until this business is viable enough to cough up for a higher bitrate on DAB (even 64k mono is tolerable). But like many of these tiny DAB only outfits, they simply don't have the brand awareness or the marketing budget to make them work.

I recall one of those outfits only having 400 listeners which Rajar reported.