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Absolute UK Shutting down AM

Miss Tuned said:
Anyone who is wondering if switching off AM reduces ratings - Absolute Radio recorded its highest ever cume and one of its highest shares in the most recent quarter, now that it is a DAB and online only station.
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DAB in the UK offers much better variety than regular analogue radio (FM or MW) in a user-friendly system that provides superior audio. Plus, the market penetration of DAB on that side of the pond is very high so most consumers have access. I brought a little Roberts portable over there and was blown away by how great the system is. In a big city, like London, there are so many stations available that you are sure to have several favorites. But where it really shined was in a place like Stoke-on-Trent, where there are probably only 5 or 6 FMs with good signals, but more than two dozen channels available loud and clear via digital.

Anyhow, the point of that last paragraph is that Absolute Radio is heavily invested in DAB and offers multiple channels across the UK (though not all channels are available everywhere but the main ones are).

With that kind of platform, in addition to streaming - the AM/MW signal was truly an afterthought and probably didn't bring many additional listeners. 99% of anywhere the MW signal goes in the UK, there's a digital multiplex offering a feed of it in crisp stereo and with a superior signal. As for the other 1%, they probably won't lose one pence without them. It's mostly a negative for dxers like us to have this transmitter turned off - though many other MW offerings are still available in the UK.
 
BRNout said:
That's a shame - was in Europe last May/June (2022) and could receive a strong signal from Absolute Radio at 1215 kHz (the old Virgin frequency) from Normandy, France all the way to Amsterdam in the clear (it faded at night). Sure, I could stream it if I wanted but what's the fun in that?
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It's amusing to me that today's 1215 was the pre-reallocation 1214 where AM DXers in the U.S. usually found their first British station.
 
BRNout said:
DAB in the UK offers much better variety than regular analogue radio (FM or MW) in a user-friendly system that provides superior audio. Plus, the market penetration of DAB on that side of the pond is very high so most consumers have access. I brought a little Roberts portable over there and was blown away by how great the system is. In a big city, like London, there are so many stations available that you are sure to have several favorites. But where it really shined was in a place like Stoke-on-Trent, where there are probably only 5 or 6 FMs with good signals, but more than two dozen channels available loud and clear via digital.

Anyhow, the point of that last paragraph is that Absolute Radio is heavily invested in DAB and offers multiple channels across the UK (though not all channels are available everywhere but the main ones are).

With that kind of platform, in addition to streaming - the AM/MW signal was truly an afterthought and probably didn't bring many additional listeners. 99% of anywhere the MW signal goes in the UK, there's a digital multiplex offering a feed of it in crisp stereo and with a superior signal. As for the other 1%, they probably won't lose one pence without them. It's mostly a negative for dxers like us to have this transmitter turned off - though many other MW offerings are still available in the UK.
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I wonder the same about FM. A few years ago, Absolute's owner Bauer bought up pretty much every remaining analog FM license that was still owned by a smaller independent company and proceeded to close down the lot and replace them with the Greatest Hits Radio network. Sad to see so many stations go away all at once, but fair enough, that's business. But what sort of business model is it? Most post-2014 cars have DAB because European rules are that all new cars have to include it, and most homes have DAB and/or a smart speaker (mostly the latter now). So your target market with your new Greatest Hits Radio FM license is "people who are driving around in old cars with FM-only radios and don't have any other good radio options". It's not a lucrative market.

The choice is the main selling point for DAB, and it's one that's more relevant in the UK (where as you say, a lot of cities have historically had very limited station choice) than in the US, where a greater selection of formats are generally available on FM. It's interesting that you mention Stoke-on-Trent, because it's in line for a new DAB multiplex in the next month or so which will carry a whole bunch of independent local stations that can't get carriage on FM or the existing DAB signals for capacity reasons. A lot have apparently been operating as internet streamers for years and DAB is giving them a first broadcast platform: Small Scale DAB for Stoke on Trent and Newcastle under Lyme

The thing that excites me most about DAB is that it brings a bit of the competitiveness and flexibility of the US radio market to the over-regulated UK. You can start a station, flip formats, succeed, fail, try something new without a huge overhead or regulatory red tape. It's making radio interesting again.
 
Miss Tuned said:
The thing that excites me most about DAB is that it brings a bit of the competitiveness and flexibility of the US radio market to the over-regulated UK.
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Of course, what you got in the US after deregulation and Docket 80-90 is so many stations that about half of them were not making money until the FCC allowed each owner to have as many as 8 stations in each larger market.
 
This is a good article about the DAB scene in the UK from a paper I wouldn't normally bother to read:

www.telegraph.co.uk

The builders’ radio station conquering the British airwaves

It may be the age of streaming, podcasts and ‘online content’, but Britain’s specialist radio stations are still booming
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk

Twirl the DAB dial and you’ll scroll through an ever-growing catalogue of boutique listening options. Nestling among the BBC’s national and local offerings, and the various incarnations of Absolute, Heart, Kiss, Magic and Capital (all now owned by the two dominant commercial radio operators, Global and Bauer), there are two Polish stations, a gay one, one for Catholics, several pitched at Anglican Christians and umpteen with an Asian focus.

This cornucopia of specialist radio is the legacy of Britain’s love affair with Digital Audio Broadcasting. DAB was launched here in 1993, and has gone on to rule our airwaves. London now boasts over 100 DAB broadcasters, giving it more radio stations than any other city on earth. It’s a technology that can accommodate far more stations than AM or the jam-packed FM, offering superior audio quality and a user-friendly interface, which makes tuning into a particular station so much easier.
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All those DAB stations come at the expense of audio quality, and the introduction of the more efficient DAB+ codec didn't help, because they only used that to make the bitrates even lower to squeeze in more stations:

 
It's been my experience that while listening, it seems that most, if not all stations tend to skimp on bitrate for their digital signals here in the US, not only over the air but over the Internet as well.

As a result, many Internet streams sound cheap and almost amateurish compared to their analog OTA counterparts; even an objectively inferior AM or analog FM signal, if it's strong enough, usually sounds better to me than the digital FM or Internet equivalents, especially on a good radio (on a bad radio, it's pretty much a wash because nothing sounds fantastically good on those).

There are exceptions to this of course, but by and large, digital signals, as usually implemented and processed, tend to sound relatively terrible to me, which is a shame because digital should sound far better than it does.

They better improve on this if they want to make it the only means of receiving signals, because with the current state of affairs, if radio went all digital today, I'd probably just stop listening to it altogether.

c
 
iHeart's 48 kbps AAC web streams sound fine, as long as you're listening in mono. They use "parametric stereo" which allocates very little of that bitrate to the stereo difference component, resulting in a narrow and heavily artifacted stereo image. Wide stereo 1960s recordings sound especially poor through it.
 
I thought the whole point was to have higher quality stereo? Stereophonic sound is basically considered standard at this point, but I guess nobody cares anymore?

At the rate things are going, I feel like digital is going to keep sounding worse until we get to the point where even AM will begin to sound pretty good by comparison (at this point, it's debatable, but largely because the sound quality of many modern AM radios isn't so great and there's lots of EMI sources in most urban and suburban areas that significantly degrades the quality of even decent radios). It's already to the point that most analog FMs that I listen to sound a bit better than their HD counterparts (biggest stations (KCBS 106.9, for example) sound fair enough in HD, but that's because they're mostly talk, where the quality doesn't matter quite so much).

Are people really willing to sacrifice that much quality just to have ten million choices instead of a few dozen? I guess so, because analog radio is dying for some kind of reason, and the ratings and ad revenues seem to suggest that digital streaming is that reason....

Although at least FM is here to stay for awhile. How long is up to the listeners to figure out.

c
 
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cc333 said:
I thought the whole point was to have higher quality stereo? Stereophonic sound is basically considered standard at this point, but I guess nobody cares anymore?

At the rate things are going, I feel like digital is going to keep sounding worse until we get to the point where even AM will begin to sound pretty good by comparison (at this point, it's debatable, but largely because the sound quality of many modern AM radios isn't so great and there's lots of EMI sources in most urban and suburban areas that significantly degrades the quality of even decent radios). It's already to the point that most analog FMs that I listen to sound a bit better than their HD counterparts (biggest stations (KCBS 106.9, for example) sound fair enough in HD, but that's because they're mostly talk, where the quality doesn't matter quite so much).

Are people really willing to sacrifice that much quality just to have ten million choices instead of a few dozen? I guess so, because analog radio is dying for some kind of reason, and the ratings and ad revenues seem to suggest that digital streaming is that reason....

Although at least FM is here to stay for awhile. How long is up to the listeners to figure out.

c
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I think the choice is what has driven DAB adoption, which has been a success in the UK. Like BRNout pointed out, this is in the context of radio markets where once the BBC have taken their slice of spectrum, a lot of cities have historically had just one or two local stations on FM with good signal. I don't think there's as much need for it in the US, but in the UK it has given a lot of quite large cities their first rock, urban, jazz, dance and country format stations among others. Prior to DAB, these formats simply weren't there - you had the BBC's stations, a local AC format and sometimes a local CHR.

For high-quality listening, a lot of stations (including the BBC) offer anything up to 320kbps streaming. I stream everything at home, and increasingly in the car. But the people listening to Fix Radio on a noisy construction site, or people driving along, aren't that bothered by slightly iffy audio quality. The 4-year-old Techmoan video gets trotted out a lot in these discussions, but ratings show that average listeners are moving away from FM (which is now at about 33% of listener hours) towards DAB (40%), but also towards streaming which is now at 24% of listener hours (10% station websites/apps, 14% smart speakers) and rising fast. The difference between the listener of 2001 and today's listener is that today's consumer is smart enough to go to the platform that offers the station they want at the quality they want.

FM was never that great anyway. I don't miss the crackles and fades and distortion on the car radio as you pass tall buildings, or trees, or any sort of obstacle whatsoever. Even the strongest signals were prone to multipath and other artifacts.
 
Miss Tuned said:
FM was never that great anyway. I don't miss the crackles and fades and distortion on the car radio as you pass tall buildings, or trees, or any sort of obstacle whatsoever. Even the strongest signals were prone to multipath and other artifacts.
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Well, as the world's youngest boomer, who still grew up with AM transistor radios in the late 60s-70s then transitioned to FM in the mid-70s, it pains me to say this......but: AM is pretty much doomed. I listen to AM. But my younger (Gen X) wife and kids (teens) won't tolerate it for one second. And they never could. The former does listen to FM but prefers Sirius XM or streaming. The kids know about radio (thanks to me) but still prefer streaming. As much as the streaming experience seems artificial to me (even the audio quality when compared with the vinyl of old) it's what's happening now

As a realist, I see radio - AM with FM following by 25 years or so - kind of slowly fading into the background. Barring some unforeseen "black swan" event that makes millennials and Y's have a clue about things not connected to the internet. It is inevitable,that technology evolves. And the replacement isn't always better than what it replaced, but it is generally more user-friendly.
 
cc333 said:
It's already to the point that most analog FMs that I listen to sound a bit better than their HD counterparts (biggest stations (KCBS 106.9, for example) sound fair enough in HD, but that's because they're mostly talk, where the quality doesn't matter quite so much).
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One factor to consider is that the optimal data compression algorithms for speech are different than they are for music. MP3 or MP4/AAC (which have become the lowest common denominator, especially MP3) are optimized for music. If I recall correctly, HD uses a variant of AAC. Thus there will be compromises for program material that's entirely speech. Unless for specialized uses, speech-optimized compression algorithms are not commonly employed.

There actually are numerous compression algorithms available, but the two I mentioned in the preceding graf are the most common, and at lower bitrates, they're not particularly good for speech-oriented material.

On KCBS, I've noticed that there's often program material that has already been digitally compressed: the compression artifacts are quite noticeable. This is on the analog signal.

Still another factor is that audio compression algorithms perform optimally with program material that has a wide dynamic range, which gives the algorithm more to "throw away" that the listener is very unlikely to notice. This runs counter to broadcast practice of compressing the dynamic range of program material. (The overloading of the term "compression" makes it hard to describe this in a straightforward way.) So the algorithm ends up "throwing away" program material that the listener is more likely to notice - and where decompression attempts to guess and fill in what's been thrown away, it makes more mistakes. A balance has to be struck between the two, especially at lower bitrates.
 
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