Just wondering what others think of this device, and to voice my personal views.

I was under the impression that DAB was to give a better sound, but the punny 128k links are rubbish. I live in leeds and I have full signal with the thing proped up on my window sill and it sounds awful, tinny and somewhat lacking.

Ok, so I can pick up some crap stations that no-one would ever want (6 music), and what is the beeb thinking of with that "online" effort. I feel sorry for those who paid £299 for this, I'm just glad I got mine for under £40.

So I am left thinking Digital Radio ? Whats the point ???

Moan over. Cris.

Hi Chris,

I got my wavefinder just before Christmas for £50 and I have to say I'm very pleased with it. I think from a 'quality' point of view, DAB is not going to give you a better sound over FM.
This is especially true at home, I live in Blackrod which is about 3 miles away from Winter Hill transmitting station so when I listen to DAB I get a full scale deflection on my signal strength. As for services, well, the local multiplex carrying Galaxy and Key 103 always sounds rubbish. But I think that's because they're overloading their encoder, which makes it clip. The BBC services sound fairly good, I have a SoundBlaster Live! Platinum feeding a generic 5.1 audio system in my study and I have to say it sounds fairly good, admittedly there is some spectral distortion and coding artefacts, but then again if I wanted to listen to quality music I’d go downstairs and put a CD on.
I’m sure it could make a difference on the move, but I don’t think I’ll be doing this until someone makes a DAB receiver for the empeg (Hugo?).
As for the stations themselves, I think 6 Music is great (but then again, I am employed by the beeb), I’m 23 and feel that Radio 1 has the most annoying crap playlist seemingly populated by the ‘So Solid Crew’ <puke> and other such musical non-entities. I dread the launch of 1xtra! The only time I listen to 1 is for Mark and Lard. I suppose it all depends on what your tastes are.
I agree you about feeling sorry for the people who paid full price for it. I definitely wouldn’t have bought it for £300. I could have got a good analogue tuner for my system for that.
As for the future, well I don’t think there will be any way to stop it now. Lets hope they expand the network and allow higher rate transport streams.

I agree with everything you said. I am also glad it only cost me £40.

Don't forget it is going to get worse as well. The BBC will be reducing bitrates again as they try and cram more "niche" stations into the mux later this year. Crazy.

I really disagree with the BBC's choice of quantity of quality.

Also, I complete disagree with people that say "you don't need as high a bit rate for speech as you do for music". In my opinion the opposite is true. You can easily get away with 128k for pop/rock music, whereas 128k for decent quality speech is just plain nasty. You can hear artefacts all the time on the 128k Radio4 feed, not nice.

I bought my Wavefinder to use to stream radio around the house, but I think I might end up plugging an FM tuner into a sound card instead and encoding to 160k MP3s on the fly...

I do still want a DAB tuner in my car though, I suspect it is far better suited to that enviroment where it actually has a chance of out performing FM. Shame Patrick can't add DAB to his tuner modules :-(

P.S. the fact that the Rio Receiver doesn't decode MP2 (which is what the Wavefinder's native format is) doesn't help my plans either.