Digital Audio Broadcasting

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) is a digital radio standard for broadcasting digital audio radio services in many countries around the world, defined, supported, marketed and promoted by the WorldDAB organization. The standard is dominant in Europe and is also used in Australia, and in parts of Africa and as of 2025, 55 countries are actively running DAB broadcasts as an alternative platform to analogue FM.

DAB was the result of a European research project and was first publicly released in 1995, with consumer-grade DAB receivers appearing around the late 1990s. Initially it was expected in many countries that existing FM services would switch over to DAB, although the take-up of DAB has been much slower than expected. In 2017, Norway became the first country to have implemented a national FM radio switch-off, with Switzerland to follow in 2026 (this decision has since been reversed) and other territories in the process of planning a switch-off. Terrestrial digital radio has become a requirement for all new cars (not buses and trucks) sold in the EU since 2021.

The original version of DAB used the MP2 audio codec; an upgraded version of the system was later developed and released named DAB+ which uses the HE-AAC v2 (AAC+) audio codec and is more robust and efficient. DAB is not forward compatible with DAB+. Today the majority of DAB broadcasts around the world are using the upgraded DAB+ standard, with only the UK still using a significant number of legacy DAB broadcasts.