I suspect you're a little confused about Olinda. It's not R&D's project
(actually, it would be R&I now), but a project being funded and run by BBC
Audio & Music Interactive, of which I'm Head of Future Media & Technology.
So, I might know a thing or two about it.
I thought you might ;)
Olinda is not - and never will be - a consumer product. What we're doing is
doing some research and design to explore user interface design and hybrid
technology around a radio; indeed, the 'DAB' bit is fairly incidental -
although the additional data broadcast over DAB is quite useful to the
project, RDS could do a similar job potentially.
And once we've finished, all this research will be released for anyone to do
anything they like with it, simply under a CC-style attribution licence.
Given we've a third party involved in the work, I obviously can't discuss
how much we're spending on this: but it's a tiny project in the scheme of
our budget.
Gotcha. :) It's a shame it isn't going to be a consumer product, I actually
took quite a liking to the whole concept. It'd be a shame to basically
develop an entire product and then not push it out to market! Like scaling a
mountain and not planting a flag at the top.
That said, DAB services, given adequate
bandwidth, are quite sufficient - unfortunately, there's too much quantity
and not enough focus on quality (I still feel like the multiplexes are being
treated like shelves in a budget supermarket).
However, if all we think DAB is good for is "a speaker making some noise",
then we might wish to pack up and go home now. The BBC national multiplex is
2 meg of data, received for free, going into 85% of all households in the
land. Think of it that way, and then think what you could do with some of
that data.
The public don't know what they want! ;) Problem is they'll settle for naff
quality because they don't realise exactly what kind of quality can be
achieved from the technology, they merely accept the broadcasted quality
because they don't believe they can do anything about it, and there we have
it. If you ask the early adopters what the quality was like at start as
opposed to today, they all take our standpoint (it's rubbish now).
Why can't the industry move towards OTA-upgradeable on-chip decoders? The
day that format is standardised and Pure / Roberts comes out with a good
standalone player, I'll buy into that immediately.
The format -is- standardised: the UK uses DAB, some countries are starting
to use DAB+ (which uses AAC+ encoding instead of MP2). Some new sets
available now are upgradeable (via USB, not over the air); this is mainly
because AAC+ adds another licensing fee, which is clearly a cost that a
manufacturer needn't pay if the device is only being used in the UK. The
"upgrade" process is, of course, turning on a dormant feature in the
chipset; doing software decoding in the way you mean would add huge costs to
a radio.
Remember that we need to make DAB as affordable for manufacturers as FM is,
in order to get it into loads of devices; and remember that few people
actually go out and buy a radio. The last few things I bought that contained
a radio were: a) a car; b) a mobile phone; c) a portable music player.
Personally, I'm (surprisingly) against the whole concept of convergence when
it concerns some areas of technology - it's not always the best solution.
I'll happily use a PDA phone on a daily basis because it enriches the
communication experience (even though it uses WinMo 6), 3G data is brilliant
and rich media on my device is great - but I'm glad it doesn't have a radio
in it and I wouldn't ever use it to listen to my music collection. My MP3
player's for that. I think the next purchase for my car is that separate DAB
receiver for vehicles which sticks onto your windscreen and uses a
shortrange FM repeater to broadcast to your in-car radio system - cheaper,
removeable and a better investment (I think) than getting a fully fitted,
integrated DAB receiver.
That's why I appreciated the modularity of Olinda when it was explained (by
yourself and your colleague) at SBES. Need AAC decoding? Buy the add-on
module! It really struck a chord with me. But even better than that, go one
step further and internalise the upgrade feature - if it adds more cost to
the device, play on the economy of scale, produce one really nice, smart
device, design it to be rugged and to last, then people will buy it and
upgrade it when they want to without buying a new unit. It's time to bring
back a little emotional attachment to things we buy :) For the 'cost'
argument, surely it's only expensive now because nobody's scaled up the
integration of on-chip software decoding?... If Rockbox can add realtime
FLAC and AAC (M4A) support to my ageing iRiver H140, it shouldn't be that
much of a problem for a company to develop one combination of chips and
build on that solid, futureproofed base. Should it?
... Or am I thinking too optimistically here? Thinking aloud, and speaking
hypothetically of course, is the digital radio industry really that
quagmired that it feels compelled to continue to bring the same types of
devices to market with no serious technical innovation past live pause and
rewind? Just because people tolerate mono speakers, does that mean they
should still offer them as it brings them slightly more short-term profit?
That's not investment in a standard to me. But again, thinking aloud here.
They must be seriously cost cutting if they're having to halve the speaker
count for the sake of affordability. In fact, is it not more expensive if
they're fitting devices with stereo decoders, then having to add another
processing stage to sum the stereo audio to a mono output for the speaker
(whilst still offering stereo output via a 3.5mm socket for external
speakers)? Or do they just cheat and only take a feed from the R channel?
I've only ever owned a Wavefinder, so everything's in the digital domain for
me (until it reaches my soundcard, that is ;)
If you're interested in this stuff, then November should bring a really
interesting day from The Radio Academy, called 'Radio at the Edge'. I'll be
mentioning it ad nauseam later in the year, but thought I'd not turn down
this opportunity.
Is that going to be a lecture or something at a particular venue? What's the
cost going to be? Could only find scant information about last year's event
(I'd be very interested in attending that but the cost for these things is
usually prohibitive for students).
