Radio fun!

[roger]

This appears to belong in the little used "Funny Peculiar" category.

This morning, I rearranged a few items around the house. In doing so, I temporarily ended up with two radios in the same room. Just for fun, I switched them both on. Both were tuned to Classic FM but one was tuned to the FM waveband and the other is DAB.

Whenever speach was being broadcast, I noticed that the voice coming from the DAB radio was approximately a quarter of a second ahead of the same voice from the FM radio. But, whenever music was being broadcast, they were perfectly synchronized. Can anyone explain that?

Roger

[Martin]

Hi Roger
This is probably one for Dave as I do not understand what you have experienced.

Certainly, DAB in the UK is poorer sound quality than FM due to the fact that it employs an inferior compression rate but that wouldn't explain what you are hearing.

Maybe it is a bandwidth phenomena or even the thickness of your curtains?

Martin

[Dave]

Hi Roger and Martin,

I'd imagine that it's due to the greater sensitivity of the human ear to speech than to music... the delay (caused by different encoding and transmission paths) was almost certainly still there on music - but you perceived it differently (or not at all!).

Probably.

Cheers, Dave

[roger]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the explanation for the delay which is certainly believable. What I find hard to believe is that I cannot detect the delay whilst music is playing. I have tried it several times this evening and I still hear it perfectly in synch... until they start talking when the delay is glaringly obvious.

It's all part of life's rich pattern, I guess!

Roger

[martindn]

Well, I suppose that there is more work to do on DAB since the live voice needs to be sampled and digitised, whereas the records are already digitised. So I could understand it if the dalay was the other way around! But Roger said DAB is AHEAD!!!!

Martin