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??The audio quality of the BBC radio stations on Freeview and Sky is excellent ?? just as it was on digital audio broadcasting when I first bought my digital receiver. It??s ironic that DAB, the service that the BBC promoted as ??CD-quality sound??, now provides the lowest audio quality of any of the transmission mediums it uses. FM, Freeview and Sky all sound better.??

One of the problems with judging the quality issue is that most listeners are experiencing DAB through fairly basic equipment. In the main, audio enthusiasts with top-end receivers hate the medium because of the thinness of the sound. Instead, the boom has been in ??kitchen radios?? ?? portable units, such as the Pure Digital Evoke-2, that can be carried around the house. For instant, no-fuss, anywhere listening, DAB can be worthwhile, assuming that we rule out headphones or upmarket sound systems, and that you can put up with frequent aerial-juggling to avoid an intrusive ??burbling?? sound, and the message ??No station available?? when you move to another room.

DAB is not a sparkling 21st-century replacement for radio as we have come to know it. Although commercial digital radio claims to ??reach?? 85% of the pop- ulation, geographic coverage is patchy and less comprehensive than FM. City-dwellers may find they have a choice of 50 channels to listen to; out in the sticks, this can fall to single figures.

The government is thankfully not making noises about switching off analogue radio ?? as it intends with analogue TV. Industry analysts say DAB has made so little impact that switch-off could not come for a decade or more, if ever.

DAB radio is selling on the back of a publicity push, particularly from the BBC, yet the UK??s 48m radio-listeners have bought fewer than half a million DAB sets so far. The listening figures for some of those new stations are pretty miserable, too ?? the BBC??s 6 Music channel attracts just 155,000 listeners a week, 0.1% of the entire UK radio audience, according to the latest survey.

Robinson believes that it is time for the regulator, Ofcom, to insist on higher standards: ??It is desirable that at least one national station should broadcast at 256kbps. In all areas of life and art, it is useful to have a high-quality marker. If the nation??s ears can be trained to accept the dull mush of 128kbps, then high- quality audio broadcasting will be killed for a generation.??

The BBC, however, is adamant that this will not happen, saying: ??All our capacity is used up; we don??t have any more spectrum to broadcast in. So the bit rate will continue at current levels for the foreseeable future.??

For radio, then, digital means quantity, not quality, even though the means genuinely exist to deliver near-CD sound through the air. Instead, the broadcasting industry is more interested in trying to pump out vast amounts of new content, most of which seems deeply unpopular.

DAB, in short, is a rotten use of broadcast technology ?? dumbed-down radio that assumes we all have cloth ears. Before falling for the hype, judge it yourself. Plug in a set of good headphones at the store and make sure you listen to more stations than Radio 3. Then consider the alternatives.

ALTERNATIVES TO DIGITAL RECEPTION

Do you want better-quality radio without taking the digital audio route? Here are three other options

1 Improve your existing FM reception

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