An expensive lesson but a welcome present

You're a good son. I would do the same for my parents. ♥

DAB's dark secret. Someone told the accountants they could ditch quality for more output and more adverts. The rest is history

Acoustic couplers - now that's going back a bit! I'm trying to remember the brand - Anderson Jacobson?

For various reasons I'm a bit late coming to this one, but fascinating as always, Mat. In particular, I was horrified by your "aside" on DAB data rates etc. I knew none of that and I found it totally amazing. Bit rates in the 64 kbps mono area must be about the same fidelity as medium wave! Bring back Luxembourg on 208m. (Actually, I reckon there's an opening for a Baby Boomers DAB station with corny DJs and all the old Pams jingles etc.! :-)

This reminds of the time when I bought a $300 Sony VCR for my mother. I bought it open box at the price at Circuit City. It was one of the few that existed that did automatic commercial skip. She could record her Soaps and not have to manually fast forward all the time. I thought it was way overpriced, but it also had the ability to pause and play in slow motion with perfect frames. Both of my biological parents have passed (my mom sadly last December), but I still have to deal with my 82 year old Step Father who does well with his iPhone and the new satellite TV system, but struggles with other technology. Fortunately he is only a few minutes away.

Good job Mat, so happy your parents appreciated the Ruark (even though it does seem like a super overpriced piece of kit). I spend a lot of time and money keeping my parents’ tech up to date and training them to use their iPhones and laptops and iPads semi-proficiently. It’s a lot of effort and all, but when I know they can FaceTime their grandkids anytime, use instant messaging and IP calling, and have access to all the video and audio programs they want to stay entertained, I feel it’s all worthwhile.

In the US we have the propriety HD Radio standard, sounds decent but based on Research it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-150kbps stream. FM analog broadcasts are still going strong here, so adoption is super lower, I had a component HD Radio tuner from Best But but sold it, the as saturation on broadcast radio here makes it unlistenable even in the background... one song then 5-10 minutes of commercial, and repeat all day long

Great vid! I could go on and on about DAB and how awful it sounds. FM was switched off some time ago here and we're left with the digital. All the classic portable radios from the 60's and 70' completely unusable. Never listen to radio anymore except in the summer when the Swedish transmissions come in clear as day. Norway never used anything other than RadioText on RDS so still in some cars the FM interrupts with Swedish traffic anouncements when the signal is strong enough.

I once gave my mother my computer speakers with subwoofer (which I only used once to have music in the car while on a holiday). Together with an old Cd player she could listen to her CD’s in her hobby room. However, nice to hear you can talk with your father about the problems of getting older. My father didn’t like that one bit.

Sad that the UK cheaped out on DAB standards ... not good for artists, not good for equipment sales. The Ruark appears to be the British version of the Bose Wave, designed with "snob appeal" premium pricing in mind. Matt, I suspect the "3D" setting throws the channels out of phase. I've seen similar tricks used on all-in-one stereos and car systems in past decades.

spooky, as i've just bought a component dab+ / fm / dlna / internet radio / bluetooth for the setup in my office

Well, now you could review the old cheap system, always loves to see stuff from "back then" :D

Is anyone else having problems with playback? I haven’t had problems before but have been trying to load this since yesterday. Update: updated the iOS, restart... great video! Thanks

Another excellent video. Watching your videos always makes me feel a bit better about things (except in this case the stupid way they have implemented DAB).

Interesting to see how different digital radio is being handled in every country. Here in Germany they did a DAB "reboot" in 2011 when they swapped to DAB+ and shut down the old DAB system entirely. The bitrate usually depends if it's a private station or a public broadcaster and also on the type of music. Some easy listening stations run at 64KBit/s while some classic stations use 128KBit/s. The most common rate seems to be 96KBit/s. The first DAB+ radio I bought was clock radio as I was annoyed to be woken up with a radio where I had so much static noise because of bad reception that I barely heard any music. It turned out that the DAB+ reception is so much better that I started to buy more DAB+ tuners. Now I'm daily using four DAB+ tuners (the radio clock, a small radio at work and one in both my private car and my company car). The audio quality of the 96KBit/s or higher stations is significant better than FM while the stations with lower bit rate sound worse than FM. There are still some spots where is no DAB+ reception where the car tuners switch back to the FM on stations that are available in FM and DAB when the signal for DAB gets lost. While that works fine on my VW radio, the volume is harmonized in between FM and DAB as well as it seems like the playback of FM signal is delayed a bit so there is no time offset between analog and digital the radio, in my Ford is just annoying. DAB is way louder and there is a time offset of about a second and the radio likes to switch in between FM and DAB about every two seconds.

Here in Ireland, only a few cities such as Dublin and Cork can get DAB. We have an Internet radio and 99% of the time listen to RTL Radio "Die besten hits aller zeiten", which is ad-free, 192Kbps MP3 and plays a wide variety of music, mainly oldies. At work, I have a DAB radio which picks up the muxes from across the border and indeed the audio quality is awful, like listening to strong AM broadcasts.

Really enjoyed all the general chat about you talking to your parents. It was really nice and sets your channel apart.

Ugh radio. My first car, I bought an iPod connector to connect to the stereo and the radio was used probably less than five hours over the five year life of the car. Mostly hate it because of ads and hating music picked for me as a secondary reason. Most recent car has XM which was useful on road trips, but I really only listened to one station anyway there and would prefer my own selection of music too. Feel the same way of Apple Music during the trial that I'm locked into what I like and no amount of people saying try this will make me change my ways :P But it's useful to see how other people use products like the difference between you and your parents. Just bending our minds to see outside our own perspective is the trick :P

If you could go back, would you save money and not get DAB in your newest car?

Probably the reason why digital radio never took off in the U.S. was because the U.S. is relatively flat, so FM signals sound really good in most corners of the nation. There wasn't a very big need for a digital system due to geography. We here also have a rather large satellite radio market, so if we want more "premium" stations we can subscribe to SiriusXM.

DAB in Portugal crashed and burned, they turned off the grid in April 2011. Reason: not enough users. Lets say they burned a lot of tax payers money for a vanity project.

Issues with it being a demo and with the broadcast industry being stupid (in the UK as it is in the US, evidently) aside, that's a pretty nice unit. Nicer at the price you paid rather than ... £629? Seriously? That's, like, US$800. Whoa. Good vid, too. I thought the two "sections" went together fine.

I'm always glad to see a video about setting up tech for less tech-savvy family and friends. It's interesting to see how we need to adjust the needs and features to suit the users rather than the high-end enthusiast devices a lot of videos out there discuss. Plus, it's a nice and sweet thing to do too. Good on you Mat.

I think I would agree with you that one is way overpriced. But your video reminds me that what I really want to talk about is the human condition. As we approach our golden years we lose a lot of our hearing. I now have 50-5,000 Hz hearing. Any speakers with that specification would be considered low fidelity indeed! It is one of the ironies of life that when we are young with super hearing, we cannot afford fine stereos. And when we are older and can finally afford a finer stereo, we cannot hear the difference. I'm sure your Dad is just fine with that unit.

Also, the word "aerial" offends my delicate, sensitive 'murican ears, it's an antenna! :p. (Lmao.)

Programmers, man. We are a lazy bunch. :p

I think it didn't show the text because they probably assumed average cdtext length for tracks.

DAB is terrible, have a portable i couldn't use due to poor signals and a 'The Bug' which i used to record a few TalkSPORT shows until i found a better way to record them off the internet.

Summed up my opinion and experience with DAB. Nice video. Definitely an Oscar contender in my (very biased) opinion.

Very interesting video and some fascinating insights into DAB. I bought my technophobe mother a basic Tesco DAB radio some years ago and she loves it, although I’m pretty certain she’s never listened to any other station than BBC Radio 4! My experience with DAB isn’t much less limited, I had a budget range Polaroid micro system with DAB for a few years but it didn’t really receive much past all the BBC stations and a couple of commercial ones. I much preferred the Philips Streamium I picked up in Ireland some years prior (which sadly I gave away) that had a CD player, USB input and an outstanding internet radio that received literally countless stations from around the world.

I am glad your parents enjoy it. That's all that matters.

The terrible sound quality reminds me of the last time I bought a new car and turned on the Sirius/XM radio that came with the car. 6 months of free usage, I think. The sound quality was so awful. I couldn't believe it. I contacted Sirius/XM and they said I could pay to upgraded to a higher bitrate - that only worked in home devices. It really is unlistenable.

Great video as usual. I rather enjoyed the mix of review and opinion piece.

Have I just been unlucky or are the electronics in DAB radios really unreliable? I've only ever had one (a Roberts) that's survived more than a couple of years.

This also explains why most DAB radios only have one speaker

Here in Australia, where we keep Irish prisoners in thatch huts (just kidding) the idea of DAB (no, really, just kidding) hasn't taken off. I've got two iPod stations made by Philips, and both offer DUD, but it's not that much use. Another technology that may have not panned out, in the gold rush sense.

The phantom character burn-in on the OLED screen is annoying. I had this on my Brennan b2 HD audio unit (which has a time of day clock when not in use), So of course there is clock digits burn in. It turned out Brennan sell replacement OLED screens that you can simply slide out and replace, which was good - BUT the advice is when not in use, unplug it. Am I alone in thinking OLED isn't really fit for purpose? Maybe Ruark offer a replacement screen!

I love buying my mom gadgets like this. I bought her an iPad Mini (2) a couple of years ago, the thing sees 8+ hours of use a day. I also bought her a second hand 3rd gen Core i5 office desktop PC (as an HTPC), same thing, hours of use a day according to the logs. It's great we're able to do these things for our parents.

A good son. And another great video. I bought Sonos for my mother and I'm not sure she really uses it. She only listens to an NPR radio stream so the one button on/off on the Sonos was perfect, but I suspect she doesn't really use it. She also lives in an area here in the U.S. where the FM signals are weak.

Wow. I didn't realize digital radio in the UK was so terrible. Here in the USA we have a proprietary type of FM radio, but it runs at 128K. Not sure which compression algorithm it uses, though. Still, all of our cars are more or less coming with it standard now. And one of the things that happens in the car is that when you select an FM station you hear the analog station for a few seconds while it figures out something on the digital stream, and then it will suddenly kick over to digital. In doing so, sometimes you hear a slight jump or repeat in the song (maybe half a second). But one thing you will notice right away is that the music quality suddenly gets better. It's actually really noticeable, especially on the high-end frequencies. I never realized how bad FM quality was because I usually only listened to it in the car so I didn't have a good point of comparison until digital radio came out.

I Just got bought my first DAB (Tescos £35 Stereo) I'm plugging it into a 1990's Panasonic Mini HIFI :) (MASH Amp) DAB sounds flat i thought it was Radio the but now i know.

It sounds like for the most part the DAB stations on an expensive radio don't sound any better than AM on my 60 year old Capehart!

After a hectic work week this will kick off the weekend nicely.

I like when you talk... 😉

I always had the feeling that DAB was too little, too late. Oscar or not, I'm sure I will enjoy watching this tonight!

I bought a Yamaha DAB component costing nearly £350 - mostly for the BBC stations, and also now realise I would probably get better sound from a 2nd hand Freeview box tuned to the appropriate radio station. Most half decent freeview boxes have both optical and RCA audio out so it would have been fine, plus guaranteed high bitrates at all times. Ah well. Was reading this years 'Radio Yearbook' and apparently the current thinking is that by 2030 TV and Radio transmissions will essentially be a non-subscription public bolt-on to 5G, with FM level penetration not requiring an external antenna in *most* areas.