DAB+ Technical Summary
| Company: |
Commercial Radio Australia |
| Author: |
Aaron Alphonso |
| Category(s): |
Radio |
| Published: |
Mon, 17 Dec 2007 |
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Acrobat PDF (603kb)
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DAB was adopted in many countries as early as 15 years ago, most notably in the United Kingdom where it has enjoyed great success. Most consumers liked the ease of use and the extra value added enhancements offered by DAB. Other than that, digital-only services made the decision to buy a DAB digital radio even easier.
In Australia, we decided to adopt DAB+, which is a similar technical framework for digital radio, that is the Eureka-147 transmission standard with one major difference to DAB in terms of the audio encoding algorithm.
DAB uses the MPEG1-LayerII algorithm which was cutting edge when DAB was first introduced. Over the years, many other psychoacoustic algorithms have cropped up over the years and arguably the best one is HE-AAC. DAB+ uses HE-AAC (versions 1 and 2). This allows for very efficient use of the spectrum, something that is very precious and is becoming increasingly rare. With DAB+ very high quality audio is achievable at impossibly low bitrates.
The following points form a technical summary of DAB+ along with comparisons with DAB, where relevant.
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