That has a lot more to do with the dated implementation and less to do with digital radio. There are a number of digital broadcasting techniques which can minimize and compensate for noise, including a slight delay with a signal correction and fault tolerant codecs.
DAB was implemented using the old MPEG2 audio codec. DAB+ uses the now 15 year old codec HE-AAC which isn't really designed to handle corruption. Opus handles loss a lot better (see their examples https://opus-codec.org/examples/ )
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 ;)
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.
Though I did a quick check and apparently DRM+ uses QAM-16, so perhaps my knowledge is far too out of date :S
(Also doesn’t analogue FM also kinda cut off fairly abruptly?)
This video gives a good example of the signal breaking down from 00:38
At the same quality dab is still perfectly long after fm becomes gabled. It then vanishes.
The problem with dab in early days was the lower strength, the poor quality decoding, and the lower bitratr than should be been used for the codec.
Haha. The DAB+ signals are compressed as much as possible.
Comparison here is FM, not FLAC.
Really soured me on this digital radio technology.