Having a DABble....
 

Sorry, awful pun, sounded better in my head...

Anyway, till now, to me DAB was something that held no interest whatsoever. I had a DAB radio on the building site and most of the time it struggle to get reception and the sound broke up loads. Whats the point of loads of stations when they dont work.

And anyway, whats wrong with FM? Always sounded fine to me, beautiful stereophonic sound reproduced with good clarity - You just had to listen to an AM station to be convinced of that.

So, the new D3 has DAB. Cool I thought when the Audi spec check lass told me, something to pad out my signature on my forum....

Anyway, all this plodding around at 55mph gives you time to fiddle with knobs and dials like you wouldnt believe.

The first thing about DAB that struck me was not only the number of stations, but how they were organised nicely into geographical areas, including a nationwide grouping. Lots to choose from.

It also has text information, and can even display images if the station chooses to send them. When songs are playing, it can give you the song information etc.....

Anyway, thats all well and good, but Audi list DAB as radio reception with outstanding sound quality.

They're not wrong.

How the heck did I ever think FM was good? Seriously. DAB is like moving from LW to FM, again.

Even if you have DAB, you also have FM for some weird backwards compatibility reason, or in my case, you're able to listen to the same national station through both methods to compare directly.

FM is flat, with no bass, little trebble and overall its like listening to a badly ripped, over compressed MP3.

DAB in contrast is absolutely comparable to listening to a high quality CD loaded in the Cd drive, if not better.

Its awesome.

I dont understand why Audi let you spend £4500 on B&O and dont build DAB into the package, but thank you Mr first owner for speccing them both up on mine :love:

I have RNS-E in my D2 with hybrid digital tuner that can receive DAB audio stations as well as digital tv channels, but I didn't listen to DAB music a lot since I thought you can only get good digital quality when car is parked. Need to try it again.

I guess in D3 with B&O sound quality will be better than D2 Bose.

Even D3 Bose wipes the floor with D2 bose - Sorry....

D3 B&O wipes the floor with anything I've ever heard before....

The B&O in the A4 though was pants, not heard it in the A6, but doubt it would be as good.

I can't understand why ALL new cars do not now come with DAB radios, given that analogue radio is due to be switched off 4-5 years along the line.

It's a 'must have' box ticked in my search

I have DAB and agree with all Ian has said.
Funny how the static DAB radio in the house drops in and out of stations, whereas the one in the car which is belting all over the place, barely misses a beat (sorry now I'm punning)

With al those stations you can select something that fits what you want to listen to.

I hardly ever listen to the DAB in my car. Cos there's something better. 18Gb and growing of my choice of music on the HDD. No yacking presenters, ever +++

Yup Ive got DAB in the A7 with 5.1 surround sound and the sound is just amazing on some tracks :D
Audi seems to have got over the signal issues generally when you are mobile and if the unit loses DAB signal then it switches to FM if it can find a signal for the same channel. if not then it goes silent! +++

I suspect that because they know the set is going to be mobile they have a better signal amplifier. Its like the old portable TV sets would always give a better picture than a 'static' set on a poor signal because they were designed to work with the coat hanger aerial, anything better was a bouns :)

Suppose that's the difference between hundreds of quid for the DAB in the car vs. tens for a home unit.

I believe analogue switch off has been delayed until at least 2019. This is mostly because analogue radio sales are still outnumbering digital ones. Another one is sound quality, the system in use in the UK is based on 1980's MP2 encoding technology and for the same bitrate as an MP3 file gives lesser sound quality. The system developed and being rolled out in the rest of europe is based on technology developed in this century and offers superior sound quality for the same bitrates. Where I live we have no freeview yet, or DAB radio reception, so even DAB/Analogue radios used here are in FM mode. My TV with builtin tuner receives just 4 analogue channels, so for the rest I have sky.

DAB in the UK is not new, its been around since the 1990's, and its taken the best part of 20 years to get to where it is now, and thats still got a long way to go.

and how will we cope with the arrival of Digital Radio Mondiale which may allow tuning to your favourite radio station Europe wide broadcast by cells using the old MW frequencies?
http://www.drm.org/