Technofile: All over the world, radio is gradually following television and going "digital", but what exactly is all the fuss about? After all, radio is radio, isn't it?
Well, for one thing, digital radio promises to open up the airwaves to a lot more diversity. Ireland has yet to convert its radio broadcasting industry to a digital format but the move is almost inevitable. With crowded airwaves, a move to digital radio would enable a plethora of new stations to set up. It's possible to broadcast 10 digital radio stations in the frequency space currently taken up by one normal radio station.
RTÉ said in March that it was going to start "planning for digital radio". Let's hope it arrives sooner rather than later.
Digital can also offer better sound quality than conventional radio, and additional services like displaying the name of the song. But perhaps the real benefit of digital radio is the ability to record, rewind and playback live broadcasts.
Digital radio launched in Britain five years ago but is only beginning to take off, with more affordable sets available on the high street and nearly all stations now broadcasting in the digital format prior to "analogue switch-off" somewhere around 2010.
To get a glimpse of the future, I tried out the new Bug radio from Pure Digital.
Pure Digital - a leading manufacturer of DAB digital radios - teamed up with noted fashion designer Wayne Hemingway to create the Bug. The LCD display is perched at the end of a metal gooseneck stand above the main unit - which has a futuristic appeal about it.
An advantage with the best digital radios is being able to see which track you're listening to via a display that shows track titles, artists' names and full programme details.
But the real trick with the Bug is its ability to pause and rewind live radio to a cache of built-in memory. It can buffer between five and 12 minutes of audio, depending on the broadcast quality of the selected radio station.
Recordings are made in MPEG-2 format, the same format used for digital radio transmissions. The Bug also has a timer that can record whole radio shows in advance.
Once recorded, you can simply listen to it later or move the results to an SD card - a common format for MP3 players, digital cameras and even some mobile phones (an SD card is not included with the radio, however). You can read the SD memory card directly from your PC or via the USB connector to the PC.
That means you can take your radio recording mobile, to a portable MP3 player like an iPod. But, depending on the playback device, you may need to use software to convert the recordings into MP3 files.
The Bug's sound quality is very good, and there are analogue and digital audio outputs, plus an alarm clock.
It has 10 presets for your favourite stations. In a nice addition, you can use the sleep function to go to sleep to one station and let the alarm wake you to another. However, The Bug started out as a "bleeding-edge" device - with rather too much pain involved. Earlier models of the Bug had no fast-forward, pause or rewind software. To get these, you had to download some software from TheBug.com website, which then had to be loaded onto the Bug via its USB port. A fiddly exercise to say the least. Happily, the most recent models have all this built-in.
And be prepared to make plenty of tea while you wait for tracks to download to your computer - it's pretty slow-going.
However, all in all, the Bug is very much the shape of things to come for radio.
Mike Butcher edits mbites.com
