Lots of woes, and no serious replies.

Whoa there SBK,

I am an old hippie who listens to Cafe del Mar, Miles Davis, St. Germain and the Dixie Chicks. The closest I get to trance is the annual outdoor event in St Miguel Ibiza a few kms from our other home. It's the ability to get DAB radio more than anything that I am interested in.

The BMW seat and wheel are indeed less than comfortable - wheel is far too thin, hard and shiny. Try a seat in a late Fiat Coupe, check the build quality, these cars are hand built by Pininfarina (but designed by Chris Bangle - current BMW style guru) & steering wheel is lovely. The Alpha GTV of the same generation is actually on Fiat Tipo floor pan, and certainly the early ones had very poor build, whereas the Fiat is a unique car, not a version of anything else, and the 20v turbo is faster than any of the Alpha versions including the v6. I am certainly going to get another (in addition to the M3 cab) a late Ltd 6 speeder. They are now on sale for peanuts, and for the uninitiated they are mindblowing.

-a chum of mine put a DAB system into his car (at great expense, much effort- a new antenna was required, and come to think of it, I cannot see how you would fix such a thing onto a soft top at all).

-after a couple of weeks he ripped the DAB out in disgust and got an ordinary radio instead. The DAB reception dropped to near zero on his regular commute (on one of our lovely main motorways no less) although it was fine elsewhere.

-I have DAB at home and to be honest I'm impressed with neither the content or the quality of the broadcasts. I have not looked at the specifications in detail, but it seems to me that the frequency response and stereo separation of DAB is actually no better than 'old fashioned FM' radio (might be worse) and certainly does not bear comparison with a CD or even an MD. They could have given us half the number of DAB channels with twice the quality, but they didn't. (oh yeah, and the 'pips' now come two seconds late via DAB....)

-Although you don't get crackles etc with the DAB you get other problems instead when the reception is poor, and actually I can put up with a few FM crackles if the alternative is no sound at all, or pops and squeaks with dodgy DAB reception, so I'm not looking to change to DAB in the car.

-oddly enough at home if I plug two different DAB systems into the same antenna, each picks up a different selection of channels. So they are 'fussy' too. The same happens with digital TV, which is likewise completely unwatchable under reception conditions that would equate to mild fuzziness on analogue TV. (incidentally, in my experience the digital TV is definitely poorer than good analogue TV both in resolution and colour separation. This is particularly evident on high quality live broadcasts: I recently had to turn over to analogue TV to watch the open golf (there is no hope for me, I know) as watching the coverage on digital TV was like watching VHS instead of DVD.)