11 Jun DRM contributes to French consultation on digital radio
In its submission sent in response to the public consultation on digital radio in France, the DRM Consortium stressed the technical and economic advantages of the DRM standard in fulfilling the imperatives of the French radio digitization, with particular focus on the community stations. Here are some excerpts:
“The Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) system developed in Europe provides a high quality digital encoding scheme (essentially a development of the Mp3 standard) … that can match the very different needs of nationwide services down to local community stations in the medium, short-wave or FM bands.”…..
“DRM is able to achieve real benefits in spectrum efficiency in all circumstances. This is through being able to tailor spectrum use to actual broadcast requirements. For replacing FM transmissions on a one-for-one basis, a DRM+ transmission needs much less spectrum and energy than FM in order to provide the same high audio quality. The spectrum needed for each programme stream is about one quarter of that needed for an FM sound broadcasting channel. Moreover, DRM+ can be configured in different ways in order to offer greater flexibility than FM or DAB broadcasting. DRM+ can, for example, offers the option of allowing much more locally orientated broadcasting within 4-way mini-multiplexes using the same amount of spectrum as a single FM channel.”…..
“Therefore, DRM+, ensuring reuse of existent infrastructure and maintaining coverage at slightly reduced energy costs with more content capacity should not be overlooked.”
“The list should maintain the economical and beneficial DRM (DRM30 for Medium Wave especially) and … especially DRM+ which would take care of smaller operators and would ensure and maintain localism.”