Broadcasting with digital audio

Digital audio broadcasting will come on-line worldwide in the next few years. The technology-also known as digital audio radio or digital sound broadcasting-promises to provide sound of compact-disk quality, nearly free from multipath distortion or other transmission interferences. And digital audio broadcasting (DAB) is not just for sound: all sorts of information, digitally encoded, will be transmitted. Testing is already under way around the world for systems that deliver DAB signals from satellites, from terrestrial systems using newly assigned spectral bands, and from in-band (that is, currently assigned) AM and FM systems. The author discusses spectra for DAB, perceptual coding, Europe's Eureka 147 system, and DAB research in Canada, the USA, and Japan.