The communications minister Lord Carter set a target last month for analogue radio to be switched off (no pun intended) by 2015. However, in a conference in London yesterday he made reassurances that the switchover would not happen until DAB quality matches that offered by FM.

In a bid to make Britain completely digital, Lord Carter compared the move from FM to DAB radio to the digital TV switchover and said “OnDigital wasn’t good enough, so only when Freeview emerged did the analogue TV switch-off start."

With the quality of DAB inferior to FM radio, the small number of cars fitted with DAB radios and the large number of portable FM radios still in use, many critics see the 2015 target as ambitious. Addressing this, Lord Carter has claimed that car manufacturers have “responded better than we expected to the DAB plan” and went on to say that the target date of 2015 will allow enough time to deal with “consumer disruption issues”.

How would you rate the quality of DAB and can you see it improving in less than 6 years?

Source: What HiFi