Introduction to Wi-Fi radios

BBC's Director of Radio & the DRDB chief exec misled Radio 4 listeners about DAB's audio quality problems

Copied below is a transcript of an interview with Tim Davie, the BBC's Director of Radio, on Radio 4 Feedback today (26th June -- starts 12:30 into the programme) to answer questions about digital switchover for radio.

Although it was encouraging to hear him say that he didn't think it was "inevitable that we [would] move to DAB", which must have been a reference to switching to DAB+, the thing that I'm sure will have stood out in most people's minds that heard the interview will have been his claim that:

 and that

I'm afraid that is totally wrong, because the distance to the transmitter only affects reception quality, so the distance to the transmitter has no effect on the audio quality whatsoever for anybody who lives inside the coverage area and receives good reception quality. And as I'm sure the vast majority of people reading this will already know, DAB's dire audio quality is caused by the BBC using bit rate levels that are far too low to deliver good audio quality with DAB's outdated MP2 audio codec. But when Feedback presenter Roger Bolton pointed out to Tim Davie that his answer was about reception quality and not about audio quality, Tim Davie simply repeated precisely the same claim that the audio quality is somehow affected by the distance to the transmitter. Whether Tim Davie simply isn't aware of what does and does not affect the audio quality on DAB is impossible to say, but what can be said is that this is yet another example of a BBC representative appearing on Radio 4 to discuss DAB which has left hundreds of thousands if not millions of listeners misled about what the actual situation is with DAB's audio quality problems.

And Tim Davie's incorrect claim about what affects DAB's audio quality also comes just a few days after Tony Moretta, the chief executive of the DRDB (Digital Radio Development Bureau), simply bullshitted his way through his appearance on You & Yours on Radio 4 on 23rd June (piece starts about 34 mins into the programme). For example, he said that it's an "urban myth" that DAB is less advanced than DAB+, and that DAB+ only delivers "very, very slightly higher quality" than DAB. What kind of fools does he take the public for, exactly? Why on earth would any organisation upgrade a system only to leave it no better than the system that was being upgraded? Absolutely ridiculous. He knew that what he was saying was false, so he obviously did lie about this, and about a few other things as well.

The DRDB is co-funded by the BBC, and at least two BBC Radio executives sit on the DRDB's board. The DRDB has been responsible for the vast majority of DAB adverts that have been broadcast on commercial radio, which included claims that DAB provides "superb digital quality sound", which ran for a couple of years just after DAB was properly launched in 2002, and it was responsible for ad campaigns that slagged off analogue radios by saying that they're worth less than a "half-eaten, out-of-date jar of pickles", and that "analogue radios are B-A-D", amongst many other dishonest claims. Is it really acceptable for licence-fee payers' money to be used to make such dishonest claims back to the general public in order to sell more DAB radios, and is it acceptable for a BBC co-funded organisation's chief exec to bullshit his way through an appearance on Radio 4 when he's been drafted in to answer listeners' concerns? I don't think it is.

If you think that the BBC needs to issue a statement to Feedback clarifying what the actual situation is with DAB's audio quality problems, or you don't think the BBC should be funding the DRDB when its chief exec lies to the public about DAB+ and other things, you can either contact Feedback, or you can complain to the BBC directly. I literally cannot remember a single example of when DAB has been discussed on a Radio 4 programme and the BBC spokesman hasn't ended up severely misleading the audience. Is it really too much to ask for them to ever tell the truth about DAB's audio quality problems? Clearly they think it is.

Transcript of Tim Davie's appearance on Feedback

Listener Keith Machin who'd phoned in:  "Second point really is about the quality of the DAB signal. The DAB signal is inferior to FM. This is a measurable, quantifiable fact. That's the beauty of digital audio. And I have yet to hear anybody from the BBC actually say this out loud."

digitalradiotech comment: Well said that man!

Roger Bolton: I asked [Tim Davie] first of all whether he supported the aim of digital switchover, and the target date of 2015?

Tim Davie: We support the idea of switchover to digital. In terms of the switchover date, our postion has always been that 2015 is ambitious. We think that the listeners need to be reassured that coverage levels, quality levels are at a point where switchover is realistic. So we are totally focused on delivering on a position where we have hit certain thresholds, we know that we're in a place where switchover can happen without widespread disruption.

digitalradiotech comment: Note that Tim Davie mentioned that listeners need to be reassured that "quality levels" will be at a point where switchover is realistic. However, the BBC is unable to improve the audio quality levels on DAB unless it switches to using DAB+, because the BBC's national DAB multiplex is completely full, so the BBC can't increase the bit rate levels to improve the quality of its stations, and with the MP2 audio codec being around 20 years old now it's already been optimised to death, so it isn't going to get any better than it is now. So unless Tim Davie is planning on switching the BBC's stations over to DAB+, he was wrong to reassure listeners about the quality levels being sufficient by the time the BBC's FM stations would be switched off.

Roger Bolton: Are you going to make that judgement yourself, or are you going to consult your listeners, many of whom dispute claims made by BBC spokesmen about the quality of reception and other things. Have you any plans to consult the audience about whether the time has come when switchover is possible?

TD: Absolutely. We're talking to Government now about how consultation should take place. I mean from a BBC perspective, whether it be feedback or our constant audience research the idea that we would move to fully engaging switchover without talking to listeners, getting listener satisfaction numbers, all the various things we do, would be not our plan in any way. We're in dialogue now for the next six years.

digitalradiotech comment: Feedback, audience research and getting listener satisfaction numbers isn't remotely similar to a proper consultation on this issue, which is what's required for something as important as the decision to switch off the BBC's national FM stations.

The one and only time the BBC has consulted with the public over its plans for digital radio was in the public consultation for the five new digital-only radio stations that was held in 2000. In that consultation the BBC deliberately chose not to mention that the result of adding the five new stations would be that the audio quality of the BBC's stations on DAB would be drastically degraded. The reason why the BBC chose not to mention this vitally important fact was because if it had admitted this the feedback from the public would have been far more negative than it was. And the public was hardly ecstatic about the BBC's plans to launch five new stations anyway, because the percentage in favour of the new stations launching were 44% for the Asian Network, 49% for 1Xtra, 54% for Radio 5 Sports Extra and 58% for 6 Music. The only station that met with widespread approval was Radio 7, which 78% of people thought was a good idea. If the BBC had admitted the truth about what launching five new stations would have on the audio quality of the BBC's main national stations on DAB, I think it's absolutely obvious that the public would have told the BBC where they can stick their plans to launch their five new stations, to be quite honest.

As the BBC hasn't consulted with the public about the audio quality on DAB yet, I think it is high time that the BBC or the BBC Trust does so in the near future. And if there is a consultation, the crucial question that needs to be asked, but which the BBC wouldn't dream of asking in market research surveys, is this: Would you like the audio quality on DAB to be as good as or better than it is on FM? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that almost everyone would answer "yes" to that question, yet as things stand the BBC is planning on switching its national FM stations off at some point in the next decade, which would leave literally tens of millions of people receiving the BBC's national stations at much lower audio quality on DAB than they're currently at on FM.

The bottom line with respect to audio quality is this: The BBC should not switch off its national FM stations until the BBC has switched the DAB versions of these stations to DAB+ AND the DAB versions of the stations have been switched off, because only then would it be possible for the DAB+ services to deliver roughly equivalent audio quality to FM.

RB: But consultation implies the possiblity of changing policy, and a lot of our listeners are sceptical. Keith Machin says for example "There's a hopeless conflict of interest here. The BBC is spending millions promoting" what he calls "the hopelessly outdated and inferior DAB system that has been rejected by every other country in the world". Therefore, the idea that you would change having invested so much is not true.

TD: Well I think we're pretty committed to digital. Having said that, since I've arrived at the BBC I certainly haven't seen it as inevitable that we move to DAB. We do believe that if radio doesn't have a digital broadcast platform it will be disadvantaged. I'm pretty convinced of that logic. What I'm not saying is that we have to move at 2015 if we haven't delivered the thresholds, the right levels of listening to digital radio to DAB. I don't think we're on a course that is unstoppable to 2015, although we are pretty committed to a DAB-switchover over time.

digitalradiotech comment: Tim Davie saying that he doesn't think that it's inevitable that we would move to DAB must be a reference to the BBC switching its stations from DAB to DAB+. However, if that is what he means then he needs to actually come out and say so. Until the BBC does come out and say that it intends to switch to DAB+ then people should assume that the BBC won't do that and I would suggest that everyone opposes the BBC's plans to switch off its national FM stations.

It is in fact very easy for the BBC, and the other broadcasters for that matter, to launch DAB+ versions of existing stations without removing the DAB version, because all they need to do is reduce the DAB version to mono and launch a DAB+ stereo version of the station in the capacity that's freed-up. The following figure shows how this could be done for Radio 2 as an example.

The advantage of the above method of introducing DAB+ for existing stations is that a DAB version would still be broadcast to provide backward compatibility for non-upgradeable DAB radios, and the new DAB+ version provides higher audio quality than the DAB version did before the change even though the bit rate levels on DAB+ would be much lower.

Then, once the vast majority of people have receivers that support DAB+, the DAB versions can be switched off to allow the bit rates of the DAB+ streams to be increased, therefore improving the audio quality. The following figure shows the effect of removing Radio 2's DAB stream to allow the bit rate of the DAB+ version to increase. The BBC should not switch off its national FM stations until all of its stereo stations are using DAB+ and the DAB streams have been switched off, because all other possibilities would lead to a drastic degradation of quality relative to FM.

Simple. Next.

RB: You see, the scepticism among our listeners is about a range of things. First of all they say the sound quality is often inferior, and I've had personal reception problems with my DAB [radio]. Do you accept at the moment DAB is often inferior to the existing sound?

TD: DAB doesn't have the coverage of FM at this point. And it's really straightforward that the quality of your audio is related to how close you are to a transmitter. So DAB currently has less transmitters, so those people who are farther away from a transmitter aren't getting as good sound. Now one of the things that I've been very clear on in my position is we will not even entertain a switchover unless the level of quality coverage is 98%, which is in-line with FM. So we as the BBC have said, without the extra 600 transmitters that we would need to put in place, DAB-switchover will not be a reality.

Roger Bolton then followed-up his original question:

RB: But that's a question about patchy reception, but the quality as well: even when you are getting what is supposed to be the best quality there are some of our listeners who thing that it still doesn't measure up to what they're getting already through the analogue system.

TD: Yeah, I know there's quite a lot of debate on this. Actually, in our research if you talk to listeners, it's over 70% of listeners think that DAB has brought improved quality. So there will always be a debate about the quality of sound based on where you are and the distance from a transmitter etc, and I know there is quite a lot of differing opinion here, but broadly, when you've got a quality DAB signal there is absolutely no doubt that listener-satisfaction is very high.

digitalradiotech comment: Despite Tim Davie saying that the issue is "really straightforward", his claim that the audio quality on DAB is related to the distance from a transmitter was actually completely wrong, because the distance to a transmitter only affects the reception quality -- and even then the distance to the transmitter shouldn't affect reception quality for anybody who lives inside the coverage area. Yet when Roger Bolton pointed out in his follow-up question that Tim Davie's first answer was about reception quality and not about audio quality, Tim Davie simply repeated his claim that the audio quality on DAB is "based on ... the distance from a transmitter"!

In reality, of course, for anyone that has good reception quality on DAB, the audio quality is wholly determined by the bit rate level being used along with DAB's inefficient and outdated MP2 audio codec. And the audio quality on DAB is poor simply because the bit rate levels used by the broadcasters are far too low for MP2 to provide good quality. That's it. This is a really simple concept to grasp, and as it is such a simple concept I find it difficult to believe that the Cambridge-educated BBC Director of Radio doesn't know this also, albeit that he obviously has an extremely busy job. But given that he's paid £400,000+ per year, I'd say he certainly should know what the actual cause of DAB's poor audio quality is by now, especially if he's going to be appearing on Feedback to answer questions where this subject would likely be raised.

So, despite the person who phoned Feedback asking for someone from the BBC to actually say out loud for the first time that DAB does deliver lower audio quality than FM -- which it indisputably does -- we're yet again subjected to at the very least an incorrect answer that he should have known the answer to, and which will have left hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of Feedback listeners misled as a result.

You also have to consider that he's a marketing man by background -- he was the BBC's Director of Marketing prior to taking his current position -- so I think it's pretty obvious that he was brought in to his current position to sell DAB to a public that's shown very little interest in it up to now (Tim Davie himself said at a radio conference recently that at the rate DAB is currently selling at we wouldn't see FM being switched off "in our lifetime"), and how well digital switchover goes will certainly be one of the main things his success will be judged on. So suggesting that the audio quality problems on DAB are due to people being too far from a transmitter definitely strikes me as the kind of thing that you might expect a marketing person to come out with if he's trying to sell an outdated technology to the public which constantly receives criticism about its audio quality. Firstly, it casts doubt in the mind of listeners who might have read or heard negative comments about DAB's audio quality, and as he also said that there's going to be another 600 transmitters being rolled out it also suggests to people that the quality is likely to get better in the future. If that is what his comment was meant to convey, when in reality the quality won't improve for anybody that has good reception quality already (unless they switch to using DAB+), then he was undoubtedly wrong to be making such claims, especially on a forum such as Feedback.

Similar things could be said about the DRDB chief executive's appearance on You & Yours, because his claim that it's an "urban myth" that DAB is less advanced than DAB+, and that DAB+ only delivers "very, very slightly higher quality" than DAB, were obviously designed to try and convince people that DAB is just fine and that people should just ignore everything that's said about DAB+.

RB: And your position is that until 98% of people get that quality digital signal you are not going to implement, or go along with the Government policy, of switching across whole-heartedly to digital?

TD: Absolutely not. I mean that's what's we've agreed with the Government, which is unless you replicate FM coverage for our national services we would not switch over.

Comment: So in other words all he actually cares about is providing coverage, and anyone who knows that DAB provides lower audio quality than FM will just have to put up with the low audio quality. 

RB: There's a confusion also with some people about what digital switchover means. I mean for most people it's switching to DAB. But of course some people listen via digital television, and other issues like this. So when you're talking about "the switchover", what are you talking about, and what proportions have to be achieved in DAB as well as in other forms of digital distribution?

TD: When we talk about "digital radio" we do mean listening through your television, through Freeview, online listening, all of the various ways which you'll be able to get radio in the future and are developing now. The switchover does refer just to the broadcast piece, which is DAB.

Comment: No it doesn't, switchover refers to switching from analogue to digital radio, not from FM to DAB, so if the BBC is going to try this line, for example by showing TV ad campaign after TV ad campaign for DAB and not showing TV adverts for the other digital platforms that carry radio, it would be yet more evidence of the BBCs extreme bias towards DAB and its extreme bias against Interent radio -- not that there's any doubt that the BBC is extremely biased after it was basically the BBC that recommended to Government that FM should be replaced by DAB and that Internet radio shouldn't be included in the plans towards switchover, and the Government merely rubber-stamped the BBC's biased, protectionist and anti-licence-fee payer recommendations.

RB: So you still have to get 98% coverage in the country and expect 98% of people to be able to listen via DAB before you'll support the move?

TD: Correct.

RB: Some people are confused, I'm confused myself about whether we should throw these analogue radios away if we want to get local services as well? A few really appreciate Radio Cumbria and some other things, and they say "I don't want to lose that"; are you going to have to hold on to your analogue set for that, for analogue services alone, and DAB for everything that's national?

TD: Our plan would be, with the Government, that your local BBC services move to DAB as well. So the plan is to go down to local level in terms of the switchover, so certainly whether it's in my area, Radio Berkshire, or whatever your local BBC service, that will move to DAB. However, a layer will remain [stuff about community radio and "ultra local" radio remaining on FM, then a bit about Long Wave not changing]

Overall then: Yet another whitewash of DAB's dire audio quality by the BBC. This is what they do.

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