"Telamon" wrote in message
...
In article .net,
"Stephen M.H. Lawrence" wrote:


"Frank Dresser" wrote
| AM IBOC has been around for a year or two, and it's still something of
a
| novelty. It doesn't seem to be taking off as quickly as AM Stereo,
and
| there aren't many receivers available, yet.

I've read the "pro and con" editorials in Radio World and some of the
other trade rags, but every single editorialist misses the following
point:

Sound quality is not the problem. PROGRAMMING is the problem.
We probably shouldn't rely on anecdotal evidence, but everyone I know
will put up with natural and manmade noise to hear their favorite shows.

Come to think of it, there's no evidence that DRM or IBOC have anything
close to a robust noise - fighting system. I imagine a good
thunderstorm
will cause dropped packets and receiver muting.

Another problem is multiple layering of compression and expansion
codec schemes. Has anyone listened to a (usually) decent - quality
AM plant that is transmitting supercompressed talk show audio
at a bandwidth of 5 KHZ with a low, low, low bitrate? Something
along the lines of 8 to 16 KHz bitrate? That fact alone puts the lie
to the digital pushers' rants about "Audio quality."

snip

DRM - Deception Radio Mondiale

Another lie is the system is open and contains no proprietary
intellectual property.

It won't be any better under the best of circumstances where you will
trade noise and interference for drop outs.

DRM is a lame scheme.


Digital radio and television are lame schemes, period. To get the same
quality as analog, you have to have a much wider bandwidth in digital.
Encoding schemes are ways of narrowing bandwidth required to broadcast, but
they all have some trade-offs. I've not been impressed with digital
satellite at all. Too much weather related dropout, and too much
pixelization, especially during fast scene transitions..