alt Hacker NewsDAB+ uses EEP (and RS) which was deliberately chosen to give better signal quality all the way to the point of losing reception. Old DAB used UEP which degrades faster, but instead of having no signal, it went to a muddier / warbling kind of sound that characterised early DAB receivers.
And technically while some people do call it MPEG2, it's actually MP2, also known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2, an audio codec in the same family as MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3).
I imagine that today they'd probably use something like Opus and a fountain code or similar, yes... But you can't expect everyone to replace their radio every 10-15 years ;)
> I imagine that today they'd probably use something like Opus and a fountain code or similar, yes... But you can't expect everyone to replace their radio every 10-15 years ;)
Certainly not, which is why I believe DAB (no plus) is still floating around. And I'm not really suggesting that they made a bad choice.
I'm mostly pushing back on the notion that digital means all or nothing audio. If broadcast audio stays alive (which it may not) then I hope the next standard is opus, fountain codes, and QAM-64 or similar so we can stuff a bunch of bits into error correction while still having graceful degradation, better than analog, when the signal degrades.