Digital radio in Canberra

I’ve done a piece for Monday’s The Canberra Times on digital radio. In brief, it discusses some of the advantages of digital radio and gives a brief review of audio quality, but it is primarily about the legal complications. According to ACMA, the present trial will conclude on 30 June 2011, its guidelines do not permit extensions of trial periods, and there is no provision in its legislation for the granting of proper broadcast licences for digital radio in Canberra.

In other words, come 1 July 2011 there will be no more digital radio here for some unknown period.

But I also spoke to the CEO of Commercial Radio Australia, and she was confident that, as with Sydney, the trial will be extended with a view to full licensing around 2013.

I do get the impression that there will be some very irritating broadcasters should it conclude in the middle of next year. After all, they’ve gone and bought equipment specially for digital radio.

Anyway, I thought that some information that didn’t make it into the article might be of interest here: the actual broadcast bitrates of the Canberra stations. Remember, digital radio in Australia is using the DAB+ standard, and the audio is encoded in HE-AAC format (High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding), so it wouldn’t be directly comparable with more familiar codecs. Still, the figures may be interesting. I got the figures from the Onkyo UP-DT1 digital radio receiver. This is a module that plugs onto the proprietary port on Onkyo and Integra home theatre receivers (it sells for $399). It discloses quite detailed information on the OSD when you press the receiver’s remote’s ‘Display’ button.

All are broadcast on channel 10B (211.64MHz). Their bitrates are:

Incidentally, while all the stations had some text accompanying their broadcast, it was mostly just some station logo. But SBS Chill and SBS Pop Asia both had genuinely useful text, alternating between the titles of the song ‘Just Played’ and the song playing ‘Now’.