Forget DAB: the future of radio is on-line

This week, as debates start about how the BBC starts to live more within its means, discussion returned to the subject of digital radio (DAB), and its potential to replace FM. Some years ago, people thought this would happen by 2010, and DAB would be the standard mechanism through which Britain would listen to the radio. It could even replace FM altogether.
But, writing in today’s Daily Mail, Guy Walters argues that the consumer has thrown a spanner in the works: only about a quarter of the content we hear is enjoyed through DAB. It’s still not universally available in new cars, and it’s still unpopular. He argues, quite simply, that whereas we bought fully in to the digital switchover for TV, DAB is frankly rubbish. So when the BBC congratulates itself on expanding its range of transmitters, lots of people will be at best apathetic, and at worst, fearful for the FM they love.

To those who claim that DAB is awful, I must agree. I own a lovely stereo which has DAB on it, but I never use this feature.
I bought myself a DAB in 2004 and hated it. First, though I am blind, with FM I know exactly how long to press the tuner buttons or turn the wheel to find the station I want because I’d learned the order. Even if I moved to another area, I could use national stations to pinpoint roughly the frequency I was tuned to in order to find something else. With DAB, it was a guessing game, as the order seemed to change with every new scan. I believe there are talking DABs now to overcome this rather specific issue to visually-impaired people, but it nonetheless takes ages to find the station you want when there is no option but to cycle through a pointlessly large choice of results, most of which are dead or broken streams anyway. My elderly grandparents make the same complaint about their one.
Next, the sound quality wasn’t all that great, when you could hear it at all. An FM station on a good signal sounds crisper and clearer. Worse, my DAB seemed to establish its own protection zone against invading forces, instantly cutting out the minute some-one walked within a mile of the blasted thing. With DAB, it’s all or nothing: a good signal, or none, no in between. This meant many of my favourite stations, I couldn’t even get. When after a few weeks the machine was rendered useless by the aerial losing the ability to remain upright and I seemed to be permanently armed with a screwdriver, I’d had enough and back it went. A year later, my parents decided that the problem was simply that I had not bought a good enough one. Bless them for trying, as the next Christmas I was presented with a much bigger one with more buttons. It was elegant, heavy, had a nice display and was wooden. It looked like a fine bit of kit. The reality was quite different. The first time I wanted to run it on batteries, I took it to a cricket match I was going to watch so I could hear the commentary. Once I had convinced the bemused ground staff that the enormous thing with which I was weighed down was in fact not a bomb but today’s finest example of the humble wireless, I switched it on, only to discover that, on batteries, it switched itself off every 30 seconds. A nice man in the crowd had a tiny transistor which he loaned me, and I enjoyed the whole match on longwave – one technophobe I’ll always be grateful to. Back in the shop the next day, I was demanding yet another refund and being told by a characteristically uninspiring jobsworth that I could only swap it for another radio. After returning 3 further radios that same day, Currys finally relented and Mum and Dad got their money back. We all agreed: never, ever again!
I have stuck steadfastly to that. I will continue to do so until I am convinced that it’s got better which, after 10 years, will be quite a task. I hate the low quality sound. I hate that it cuts out all the time. I hate that, in cars, it is apparently useless. I hate that, in place of radio 4 longwave, the BBC has a ‘pop up station’ which it opens whenever the longwave schedule deviates from the FM one. You can’t just drive along with the radio on and wait for the Daily Service or Yesterday in Parliament; you’ll now have to wait until it’s just about to start, pull over, and scan the endless array of crap stations to find the ‘pop up,’ and do the same when you want to go back to radio 4 again.

The future of radio, frankly, is on-line. When mobile internet becomes cheaper, I hope it’ll really take off. If digital radio was supposed to offer us crystal-clear sound, reliable signal and access to our favourite stations at the tap of a few buttons, it has failed monumentally. It is as much of a flop now as it was when it was launched. Apps offer a far more exciting glimpse at the future of radio. Some apps create playlists for you based on musical preferences, allowing you to create stations of your own without the vacuous conversational interludes on many a music station. Apps like Tunein Radio Pro, available for pennies compared with bulky DAB radios, allow you to search for any station in the world and be playing it in no time. I regularly use it to listen to the Irish country and folk music shows on the local stations I love, that I once could only hear during my brief visits each year to Ireland. Whether my local town and county stations, or stations on the other side of the world, I can hear it in near-perfect quality audio. There are plenty of extra stations only available through this medium. Reviving and re-inventing digital radio now is a bit like inventing a video player that doesn’t wreck the cassettes: as worthwhile as locking the stable door when the horses have already bolted and gone miles away.