How many digital radios have you bought over the years? How many are still working? Of the four I used to have, only two are now working and those only in certain parts of the house. I wonder, if a nationwide audit were conducted, how many DAB sets would be found that are still up and running and in daily use? It’s far easier for me to take a laptop into the kitchen and listen online than to struggle to hear through the wheezes and pops emitted by the DAB radio. Why the signal never seems to improve, even in crowded urban areas, is a puzzle. Meanwhile the amount of audio content you can tune into online is booming, either created as single podcasts or streamed by thousands of new radio stations, such as Radio SouriaLi, set up by Syrian émigrés and currently broadcasting to the Middle East and online, as yet only in Arabic, a soap about refugee life modelled on The Archers.
issue 17 January 2015
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