First AAC+-upgradeable DAB receiver

The first receiver that it has been confirmed will be upgradeable to support AAC+ decoding on DAB is new the Morphy Richards 27024 DAB/DRM radio in an interview with Martin Robinson from Morphy Richards in a British DX club magazine, in which he said:

"The radio has been designed to be as future proof as possible and in
the event of the implementation of the AAC+ codec for DAB and also
DRM+ being rolled out we would be in a position to allow future
upgrades to allow the current radio to receive these transmissions."

You can ignore the "in the event of" bit, because implementation of AAC+ is inevitable in the UK, but he was probably told to say that by the UK DAB industry, who are paranoid that sales will stall if the general public realises that all current DAB receivers will be obsolete in a few years' time.

Furthermore, this gives the first concrete proof that Radioscape - which produces the DAB modules that Morphy Richards uses in its receivers - will make its receiver modules upgradeable to support AAC+ - before this they had only admitted that they would be producing new modules that would support AAC+ on DAB.

Radioscape is the second largest DAB module manufacturer after Frontier-Silicon, and between them their modules are in over 95% of all DAB receivers sold in the UK. Previously, only Frontier-Silicon had announced that their new Venice 5 module, which will being to appear in products in the spring, will be software upgradeable to support the new DAB+ standard, so this is encouraing news that brings the adoption of AAC+ in the UK a step closer.

The Morphy Richards 27024 radio, which is pictured below, only seems to be available in Germany at the moment at a price of 199 euros.

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