Sunday, December 06, 2009

DAB off-air: Luckily nobody noticed

The commercial DAB national network fell off the air earlier today.

Of course, it's cruel to say nobody noticed: Digital Spy forum members noticed. But many people on Digital Spy only listen to the radio in the hope there's going to be a massive technical failure, so they won't be upset.


4 comments:

James said...

I've not been to Digital Spy this morning - Have they started discussing their dream DAB-off-air line-ups yet?

Anonymous said...

Excuse my ignorance but how can a whole network go down? Is it all centrally controlled or something?

I'm a wifi/web/internet radio supporter so I guess this should make me say that it's yet another argument against DAB but I know that it will probably get ignored as the DAB radios get overstocked in shops. Have you tried looking for a reasonably priced internet one? Good luck. DAB? Shelves and shelves of the things.

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

@James
"The best of ambient sound from the 1990s" - I've always felt the ambient sound of the 1990s was much lusher listening experience than that this decade, when too many non-broadcasting stations were crammed in to the platform.

@anonymous
I'd imagine that the point of failure would be where the signals were being sent to the transmitters - they presumably have to go through a central point to be distributed.

Agree on the short supply of reasonable internet radio; I wound up with a £80-ish iBlik which is pretty good but still feels a little more than it should cost.

anon #2 again said...

I bought one of these about a year ago for £50. Can't say I've had any real problems with it that haven't been to do with broadcasters. Certainly it's a very basic model and it was probably out of production even by the time I bought it but it has done the job nicely and gives me access to podcasts, on demand, file streaming, etc. although like you say probaby more than it should have cost given that it's quite likely very cheap to produce. Still, it's quite laughable the sort of thing you see in actual bricks and mortar if you can actually find them. For example, apparently the same model as mine costs double what I paid not only on this M&S site but also in store.

Post a Comment

As a general rule, posts will only be deleted if they reek of spam.