I agree with everything you said. I am also glad it only cost me £40.

Don't forget it is going to get worse as well. The BBC will be reducing bitrates again as they try and cram more "niche" stations into the mux later this year. Crazy.

I really disagree with the BBC's choice of quantity of quality.

Also, I complete disagree with people that say "you don't need as high a bit rate for speech as you do for music". In my opinion the opposite is true. You can easily get away with 128k for pop/rock music, whereas 128k for decent quality speech is just plain nasty. You can hear artefacts all the time on the 128k Radio4 feed, not nice.

I bought my Wavefinder to use to stream radio around the house, but I think I might end up plugging an FM tuner into a sound card instead and encoding to 160k MP3s on the fly...

I do still want a DAB tuner in my car though, I suspect it is far better suited to that enviroment where it actually has a chance of out performing FM. Shame Patrick can't add DAB to his tuner modules :-(

P.S. the fact that the Rio Receiver doesn't decode MP2 (which is what the Wavefinder's native format is) doesn't help my plans either.