Pure Dance & Choice FM Launch on Digital Satellite

2nd June 2004

Pure Dance is launching on digital satellite from 12pm today. As its name suggests, the station will only play dance music, and is only available on digital satellite and on a web stream at the present time. The addition of a dance station is a welcome addition, because it is expected to actually play dance music, rather than the stations like Galaxy and Kiss, which try to make out that they play dance music, but in reality just play urban music in the daytime and have a few specialist shows in the evenings/early mornings. However, Pure Dance are only using 128kbps, which as DAB-owners will know, provides poor audio quality. And as it only costs about an extra £5,000 per annum to transmit at 160kbps, or an extra £10,000 per annum to transmit at 192kbps, it's a shame that they couldn't invest the extra to use a decent bit rate, although maybe once they're more established they will increase their bit rate. It is more excusable that this station uses 128kbps because they don't have the financial backing of a large commercial radio group. But they have got major name shows on like Carl Cox and Hed Kandi, so you'd have thought they'd be able to invest an additional £5,000 per annum to transmit at a reasonable bit rate. Pure Dance is on EPG channel 938, and they've got a narrowband web stream from their website, which they hope to increase to a broadband MP3/WMA stream in the next few days.

Also, the Choice FM station (which is called Urban Choice on DAB) is also broadcasting on digital satellite labeled as "5741" (12.324 V, symbol rate = 27.5, FEC = 2/3), and should be going on the Sky EPG from today on channel 939. Thankfully, Capital (the owners of Choice FM) are using 192kbps for this station. This is one of the few remaining non-local DAB stations that is not currently on digital satellite, and the only notable stations that are on DAB but are not on DSat now are Life, Saga, and Smooth.