DAB idiocy
m posted in General moans on October 6th, 2005
DAB radio should be the greatest thing available to the “alternative” music-lover. DAB is to analogue, as broadband is to dial-up. They can squeeze dozens of channels down those ethereal pipes, providing everyone with a channel that will appeal to their musical peculiarities. In a sense, I can’t complain about the reality. There’s XFM, 6Music, The Storm, Planet Rock, BBC7 and a smattering of other channels with occasionally scheduled tranches of agreeable noise. So that’s great. It means I don’t have to get annoyed about falling between Radio 1 and Radio 2’s target audiences.
But there’s still a problem here, frankly. I can’t listen to any of these channels. I can’t listen to them because my first two attempts at buying a DAB radio have ended in silence. At least, there’s been silence from the radios. Foolishly, as soon as Goodmans announced they were bringing out some new DAB chip that would bring the prices down from £300 to about £100, I started hunting around for one of their first attempts. I ended up with one of these;
It looks grim, doesn’t it? It sounds worse than it looks. At least it did until it stopped working. It took about 18 months for it to finally give up, so after I’d knocked it about a bit, I submitted an unfavourable review to Amazon (who rejected my possibly overly honest words) and looked around for a replacement. I wanted DAB, MP3 CD capability, an alarm and a sleep timer. So when this turned up, I ordered it almost immediately;
The sound quality was excellent, it was easy to use, and I was content. But the DAB tuner broke after 8 months. Eventually, after 2 months of trying to fix it, Samsung threw in the towel and said they’d have to give me a refund. They’d discontinued the stereo, and had no spare parts for it. It’s being picked up tomorrow.
After two cheap failures, I’m going for a more expensive disappointment for my third attempt. One of these should be with me in a week’s time;
We’ve had a Pure Evoke-2 for a while, and it hasn’t broken. So I’m hoping that this one will at least make it through the 2 year mark. At last, I’ll be able to wake up to the sound of London local ads on XFM, then hurriedly switch over to 6Music (where I’ll find Phil Jupitus, so I’ll switch that over straight away), then over to more adverts on Virgin, flick to Storm (who’ll be playing something intolerable like James Blunt, as they like to please idiots at breakfast time), then end up on a DAB broadcast of the Today programme on Radio 4; a channel which I could pick up on our £10 bathroom radio. I can’t wait.
