Early adopters of digital radios have not all been overjoyed with their purchase. A story in The Australian last week quoted a disgruntled purchaser as saying, “It just didn’t work. The screen would have a song title and an artist tracking through and it wasn’t the song that was playing.” Also there remain numerous black spots where reception simply disappears. But it seems that digital radio’s teething problems are not confined to consumers. There could be problems in the studio as well.

Last week radioinfo received a tip from an announcer, who prefers not to be named, saying, “Just in case no one else has pointed it out the Telstra change over from analog to digital lines feeding transmitters has… in my case at the very least …. been less than satisfactory.

“There is a micro second delay now which means you cannot monitor “off air” but have to monitor “program”. This is potentially really dangerous if your station doesn’t have adequate in studio warnings of the loss of an air program – especially if you put that in an emergency broadcast context.

It really is a step backwards as monitoring “off air” is the best way to go for a host of reasons and this creates problems … and maybe I’m getting old and grumpy but a lot of the “improvements” and “progress” I’m seeing is not in fact progress but a further erosion of the concept that what is going to air and the quality of what’s going to air should be the key focus of a radio station.”

Do you agree? Have you come across the same problem as our anonymous contributor or others relating to digital?

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