Cheap and cheerful DAB

DA-1 DAB Audio Adaptor by Curry's.

This is a small and cheap [£39]device that acts as a discrete DAB tuner, requiring a line level preamp to operate. So what do you get, the device, a remote, and a power supply. The Manuel is thin but gives the bare bones to be able to operate the device. Straight out the box, with no attention to aerial placement I was able to receive 5 stations, these sounded bubbly as if the announcer was speaking under water. Frankly I was going to take it back, but then I remembered how sensitive our other DAB is to aerial position. Carefully securing the cord aerial in as near vertical position as possible, I then rescanned for stations.This time the DA-1 found 29 local and national stations. The DA-1 has a seven segment signal strength meter, the centre position being the minimum required to provide an audio output, though in practice one segment less is listenable. Having now sufficient stations, the question was how to hold the aerial vertically. I've used a 5mm aluminium rod bent to form a base so it stands unaided. Initially the wire aerial was cellotaped to the rod, but this seemed to reduce sensitivity. The solution was to stand the aerial off the rod using short lengths of sticky tape. So how to improve the performance further ? Out went the cheap IC that I had used to get the unit going, and swapped with silver twisted pair this lifted performance several notches. Then I looked at the power supply, which is truly mediocre. This was swapped for a regulated adjustable lab power supply. Good grief is this the same DA-1 ? using the new psu signal strength is higher on average by one segment, and audio output is quality much improved. At some stage I'm going to open up the unit to allow a external aerial to be fitted and maybe access the digital output and route it to the DAC of my Quad 99cdp. So is this a cheap way into DAB, definitely but with the caveat that great care is taken with the aerial placement. Don't think that this is going to sound better than your troughline or fm3, but it will allow you access to those stations that only populate DAB.

 

I might have a look at then, I only use the radio for footie and some games are DAB only (I cant believe Radio Lancashire sometimes actually broadcast dingle games instead of ours on the FM frequency, I might write to my MP about that). I do actually have two freeview things from my pre-sky days but these are ugly and require the TV for channel finding.

 

I saw those... thought it was quite a nice toy Looks a bit like a squeeze box innit!

 

What brand is it, cant find anything on their website.

 

its curry's/ dixons own Matsui ?

http://www.currys.co.uk/product.php?sku=793017

 

There are some threads about tuning ? ? ? the Matsui DA 1 on the Radio and Telly forum

http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/cgi-bin/forum/YaBB.pl?board=DAB

 

That and the links was exactly what I was looking for ! The soldering iron is now warming up .......

 

I've had one of these for about a year now: not fettled it at all!
It lives in my "study", with the PC and runs through an Exposure 7/8 with LS3/5a 'speakers.
SQ is OK, but can't touch the main system's Roksan Caspian FM tuner (no surprise there, then!).
As said elsewhere, useful for the non-FM stations and can't complain, not at that price!

 

Had my eye on this for a while, was hoping it'd have some form of digital output really (optimistic I know, but I have a spare input on my DAC, and the cheapo cambridge DAB tuners have both coaxial and optical outputs). Still, for the money, sounds an impressive enough bit of kit.

 

I've now added the coax connections......this has reduced the standard error rate from 15 to zero on my ten strongest stations. This has had a disproportionate effect on sound quality, jumping to a point where it is now close to fm via the cable TV feed. The aerial usd was a standard fm circular omni in the loft turned through 90 degrees ...not even orientated to the main transmitters. I'll add to the DIY section specfic details but they don't differ from those in the links provided.

Its obvious that this source has its weeknesses but to get those stations that are not broadcast on fm.....this is a great cheap alternative.