theJazz

Have you listened to new digital radio station theJazz yet? I must admit that I haven’t much, since although I can take or leave jazz, I do need to be in the mood to spend much time listening (Mind you I am tempted to get the newly remastered Beiderbecke trilogy including a CD of the fine accompanying soundtrack by Frank Ricotti which kind of mimics Beiderbecke. But I digress).
What I do know is that jazz listeners are a notoriously picky bunch when it comes to the quality of the audio they’re listening to. So I find it baffling that theJazz, sister station to Classic FM, should launch in glorious mono! Yup, because there are now eight stations on Digital One*, along with 30% of the bandwidth going over to TV over DAB, there’s not enough space for a stereo service. So instead, there’s a fine mono one! Simiarly, pop service Core is also now mono. Oneword and Talksport have always been mono, leaving just Planet Rock, Classic FM and Virgin in stereo (the latter two at the higher 160 kbps). DAB’s the future kids!
Interestingly, the now online only Jazz FM (unless, curiously, you live in the Severn estuary, where it’s on DAB) actively promotes a high bitrate stream in conjunction with Real.
I’m sure that with the recent official adoption of AAC as a DAB codec, services will slowly begin to morph over to this more efficient use of bandwidth as radios capable of playing the new codec begin to reach some kind of critical mass. At that point, services will be able to drop back to mono. Sadly, given that there are something like four million DAB sets in the market, with none of them currently able to use AAC, it’s going to take quite a few years to move consumers over to an improved codec. I’m not holding my breath.
In the meantime, I’d love to know what the real feedback has been so far in the UK jazz music community about this new station. Is quality really important?
*Home to my employer’s service. I am of course, like everything on this blog, speaking in a personal capacity, and my views don’t necessarily reflect those of my employer.