Digital Radio Mondiale on shortwave

[Da5id4Vz]

Slashdot ran this article yesterday:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/16/2240202

I'm curious if any of our golden-eared friends have had any first hand experience with this.

I found this statement to be a little disturbing:

The quality of the broadcasts are close to that of FM radio.

Perceptual audio codecs are a great thing in that they seem to be making a lot of media transport possible that wasn’t conceivable 5 years ago. But in general, it strikes me that we are slipping a bit in the wrong direction. Storage is more than 1000 times cheaper than it was a decade ago. I wish there were more emphasis on the high bit rate stuff and less of the "its almost good enough" mentality that seems to come from transport and tiny storage devices.

Any thoughts?

[JOE DIRT®]

almost like the AM stereo fad that lasted a brief period

[Da5id4Vz]

Check out the air check samples:

http://www.drm.org/system/centraudiov202.htm

I think there is a little bit more to it than that.

AM stereo was, well, still AM.

This stuff is 64 QAM on short wave and far more analogous to XM Satellite, except with out 100+ channels and without the massive overhead of launching satellites.