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I notice that many of the Perth commercial DAB+ stations have had a drop in listenership. Six of 25 commercial stations use 48 kbit/s data rate and the rest use the lowest quality 32 kbit/s. There are 7 community stations who vary from mono 32 kbit/s speech to stereo 64 kbit/s music.
ABC has all of its music channels on stereo 80 kbit/s, Local radio on stereo 64 kbit/s which includes some news interviews in stereo, and speech channels at mono 40 kbit/s. SBS varies in stereo between 40 and 72 kbit/s
Perth and Adelaide have only one Commercial/Community transmitter and a Government transmitter.
None of the commercial stations have any images most of the government stations have images, many stations have text usually for track names.
Lastly there is no separate ratings between the analog and digital versions of the simulcast stations.
StJohn,
We always love your comments and also the discussions they often elicit between you and Anthony the Koala.
Commenting on your last point, just for clarity, it is a policy decision by the ratings committee that all surveyed stations with a mainstream analog licence will have figures from their digital transmission platforms published as aggregated figures with analog. This includes DAB+ and online streaming transmission.
While the platforms are differentiated for the internal information of survey subscribers, they are not published separately in the publicly released figures.
I should have added that most DAB+ radios have an info button or menu which will show the data rate for each broadcast.
St John
Editor,
Thanks for the comment.
I should add that the drops in listeners in Perth are not due to the Covid virus because the only restrictions at the time of survey were affecting large entertainment venues eg Optus Stadium and live theatre, and of course the closed border. Even cinemas were open with reduced allowable audience.
I would like to know if the same drops in sound quality have been applied in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane all of which have an additional transmitter each.