[juliemeikle]

I have a Pure radio and a cheap Matsui portable in adjacent rooms in south east London. There is a 2 second (or therabouts time delay on one of them so they are not in sync.....just as if one was on FM, but I double checked that...it is so annoying.....any ideas?

[KJ Palmer]

As I understand it, the DAB signal has to be decoded from the transmitted digital 1's and 0's and converted to audio, so when you actually hear the broadcast will depend on the speed of the decoding chip/algorithm. At a guess (though not necessarily), the Matsui probably has inferior hardware/software so might lag slightly behind the Pure.

[mike7]

The problem arises with the distrubution of the signal to the transmitter. Only an FM or AM radio gives you the Greenwich 'pips' on time. As an interesting experiment switch on the same radio channel on DAB, FM, Freeview and Virgin or Sky. They all have differing length of delay from true time. Another reason to keep FM ?

[juliemeikle]

Thanks Mike. I see you are in Norwich. I usually live in North Norfolk and we have only just got DAB....and the FM reception is dire on the coast so I was glad to get the digital signal. I am here in London .....a stones throw from the greenwich pips, occasionally and it is irritating to hear the time delay coming from a different room!

[k-spin]

Do either of your sets have a "live rewind" type feature? I encountered a similar problem to you when watching the cricket over the summer. I wanted to watch the HD pictures from Sky but listen to the TMS commentary on the radio. Unfortunately the Sky feed was a couple of seconds behind the DAB radio feed so I would hear a wicket going before the bowler had even released the ball I managed to get them pretty much in sync by rewinding the DAB by a couple of seconds.

Might be a bit more difficult to accurately sync up two audio signals though

[shedtastic]

This is a cheap feature that I would like to see as standard on all DAB radios - the ability to set in a defined additional lag. I like to have radios on in more than one room so that I can still listen as I wander about the house. Given that different radios (and freeview boxes etc) all seem to have different lags, I'd like to have a menu option on each radio so that I can dial in an additional x millisecond delay so that they all match the slowest. Since most DAB radios use a chipset from a single supplier this wouldn't be too hard to roll out, and surely it's just a bit of code so wouldn't be too expensive to implement?

Yes, it would take a little time to set up around the house, but not that much and worth it, I think..

Neil.

[tribewright]

Originally Posted by shedtastic

surely it's just a bit of code so wouldn't be too expensive to implement?

Unfortunately, not. you would need some way of storing several seconds of audio (or raw signal data, which is usually the way it is done with the rewind function) whilst it is waiting to be played back at the time you want. When you use the delay function, you also have to account for the time it takes to access the memory to write and then read it - which is why it is impossible to get the rewind function to have a shorter delay than roughly half a second.

Yes, you may be able to program a delay into the decode routine, but to make it a variable would be difficult. There are other ways of delaying the audio signal, but all the ones I can think of to make a user-editable delay would require a hardware change.