According to RAJAR figures released around the end of last year, listening to radio via DAB in the UK has now overtaken FM/MW/LW combined (43% vs. 34.2%).
Listening figures are out for the UK radio industry and show radio continues to attract 89 percent of the population aged over 15.
radiotoday.co.uk
In terms of audio quality, DAB in the UK is technically run in the same way the commercial Freeview multiplexes are - cramming as many services on whilst pushing the limits of what the general listening audience will tolerate. The early days of DAB in the country with a more limited set of services delivered with at least a half-dencent bitrate MP2 stream didn't work out (aside from the big cost of early receivers). Ultimately what attracted more DAB listening was adding more services at the expense of bitrate (partly compensated by more efficient MP2 encoders), down to downgrading some services as mono from stereo/joint stereo. More recently DAB+ stations have been rolled out, though again it's been more the case of doing so to add more stations per multiplex/ensemble but at least some stations that were in mono are now in stereo again.
Looking at
Wohnort, all DAB+ stations in France appear to have a fixed bitrate of 88kbps using HE-AAC v1 which should deliver good to very good results. In comparison quite a few DAB+ stations in the UK go down to 32kbps or even 24kbps HE-AAC v2 - for the 32kbps stations they don't sound too bad as long as the sampling rate is at 32 kHz (e.g. Heart 90's IIRC) but on the SDL ensemble/multiplex (which I can't receive here at home) BFBS is doing 24kbps stereo with a sampling rate of 48 kHz, and it sounds very poor with a lot of "metallic" artifacts.
For me the main boon of DAB for me is the availability of Absolute Radio. Even at 80 kbps mono MP2, it's many times better than a scratchy mid-powered AM transmitter around 60 miles away (Lisnagarvey on 1215 kHz) which is listenable in the day if there's no local electronic interference, but forget it when darkness falls. I do wish though that Bauer would transform the station to DAB+ even if it means being no longer able to listen to it on my Acoustic Solutions Portal 2 DAB/FM radio, though having bought it 17 years ago, it owes me nothing at this stage. I only wish that more of the modern DAB+ radios available these days aped the likes of the AS-P2 radio in having an F-socket for an aerial connection & line audio output.
As it is, DAB(+) in the UK isn't an option for serious, high quality audio listening at home. The best option in that regard is the high bitrate streams that some broadcasters offer - but truth be told, most people listening to radio stations at home these days are likely to be doing so via speakers that mask a lot of low bitrate issues (mobile phones, voice-activated gadgets like Alexa, most portable DAB(+) radios etc.) so commercially, the bitrate battle was lost some time ago. If a station is available on FM and the received signal is strong & clean enough then it too is an option, but an awful lot of such stations these days have their audio compressed to an nth of their lives.
I had a DAB catch at 280km over the summer, using a dipole antenna.
