DAB

Digital audio broadcasting: the DAB digital broadcasting standard was intended to replace analogue FM radio broadcasting thanks to its many advantages: digital audio quality, increased number of stations, robustness to interference in mobile reception etc.

However, the DAB standard and its implementations failed to produce a system for the high quality broadcasting of a large number of radio stations. And DMB (Digital multimedia broadcasting) systems, which are extensions of DAB, can carry 4 times the radio flow and are currently preferred.

However, some DAB networks in use since the end of the 1980s are evolving and DAB is present in a number of European countries including the UK, where it was covering 88% of the population by 2006. In November 2006, WorldDMB announced the introduction of the AAC+ audio codec, intended to improve radio quality by replacing MPEG-2 (which could not achieve FM quality at less than 192 kb/s).

In France in December 2007, T-DMB was chosen as the standard for digital radio broadcasting.