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Thank you James - I too appreciate appropriate use of the ancient art of rhetoric in discussion (though I suspect you weren't intending it as a complement).
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For the record, I wasn't in any way promoting the use of DRM+ for UK community radio, so I'm not clear why you referred to it in replying to my posting. I note you also implied in another reply that Phil Dawson had said Radio 6 Music was available only on DAB, which he hadn't. Perhaps you prefer misdirection to rhetoric in discussion!
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Thank you also for clarifying your personal use of the term "market-led" - I had misunderstood you to mean "consumer-led"/"listener-led", but I guess you were meaning more what I would have called "industry-led". FM radio, vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs were all technological shifts in consumer media that had similar technology market issues as DAB has, but all four of those were devised by technologists as market responses deficiencies in the existing technologies perceived by the users as well as the industry ("build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door"). DAB on the other hand came about in response to perceived economic advantages to the industry, and not in response to any direct consumer desire or call for improvements to existing services. Whilst its advantages are incremental (more channels in dense markets), it's adoption by consumers requires a step change (new radios). 
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But back to the point at issue - I was distinguishing DAB and DAB+. Since the term "DAB" may refer to either, for the sake of clarity, I'll refer to the original MP2-based system as
<strong>DAB-</strong> and the newer aac-based system as
<strong>DAB+</strong>.
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My point was, and remains, that I believe the DCMS/BBC/Ofcom (and many industry pundits/DAB- proponents - you know who you are) seriously mis-served the UK listening public by doggedly pursuing a purely DAB
<strong>-</strong> strategy over the last 6 year or so since the advantages of DAB+ and the certainty of multi-standard receivers became overwhelmingly apparent.
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There was an argument at the time that a 'mixed message' created by any talk of a newer system could damage a fledgling industry, but that seemed at the time, and still does, to be a false worry, because (a) there was a strong drive already to the production of DAB-/DAM+ multistandard receivers, and (b) there was an opportunity to introduce DAB+ first in 'virgin territory', where there was, naturally, no significant existing installed base of older DAB--only receivers that would be made obsolete, and also where there was a clear need for BBC/community multiplexes with greater channel capacity as there were unlikely to be additional commercial multiplexes interested in serving many of these areas - as has proved to be the case so far. 
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As an aside, we have 13 in-use FM receivers in the household (not at all unusual when you tot them all up), and only one is capable of receiving DAB. The radios range in ages from 2-30 years, and all can receive more stations on FM than on DAB, so DAB offers us little enticement at the moment. With DAB+ and a more comprehensive set of services it might have been more attractive.  
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I agree about the value of the 'hybrid radio' concept. Throughout the recent DAB era there has been no technological barrier to making radios that offer just the same features on FM as they can on DAB (tuning by station name, live record/pause/replay, 'now playing' display etc) - all of this has been well within the capability of standard FM+RDS since the inception of DAB, and cheap chipsets have been there to support it for at least a decade (as evidence I have a 12-year-old cheapo "MP3 player" that has FM radio with record and replay built in). It is a shame that, with a very few notable exceptions, the industry has failed to produce services and receivers that provide a uniform set of features for listeners, regardless of whether the source is FM or DAB. I'm not aware of any radios that even offer the obvious option of switching between FM and DAB (and network/DTV as well I guess) according to which is giving the best reception of a chosen programme service.
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Alex
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<blockquote style="position: relative; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 10px; border-left: solid 1px blue;" type="cite">
On 16 November 2014 at 16:38 James Cridland <james@cridland.net> wrote:
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<br />Not sure you've understood what I was saying, but thanks for lots of anti-DAB technology rhetoric.
<br />
<br />By "market-led", I'm talking about the international market, including receiver availability and market conditions as well as technology - things that this paper ignores. I love DRM+ as a technology - though there's not much wrong with FM, either. The bald facts are that there are no DRM+ receivers available anywhere in the world at any volume; and as for DVB-T Lite, that's fanciful nonsense, requiring an entirely new transmitter network. Meanwhile, DAB+ has wide take up across Europe and Australia, and is now in (so they say) 70% of all new cars as standard bought in the UK. It is nonsense to expect community radio to willingly accept DRM+ as a future standard if there are no receivers out there.
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<br />I remain against any government-mandated switchover, and point to the future of radio as being multiplatform. Community radio would do well to pressure receiver manufacturers to be platform agnostic and embrace the benefits of hybrid radio, which would then enable a level playing-field for all broadcasters, irrespective of chosen platform.
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<br />
<a href="http://www.mediauk.com/article/34394/radioplayer-on-a-radio-a-user-experience-triumph">http://www.mediauk.com/article/34394/radioplayer-on-a-radio-a-user-experience-triumph</a> shows just one example of a platform-agnostic radio. Now, why can't we have more of them?
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<br />
<a href="http://james.cridland.net">james.cridland.net</a>
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