Week Forty-Five It’s SEMA Week In Vegas.

On the Morrow, as ever is, I am due at a digital radio conference. I have been sent press releases with carefully coiffured quotes about what exactly is being said and by whom, all in advance and embargoed like it matters. I will have to get up like a London commuter, travel into town on a packed tube to get to a ‘˜Conference Centre’ near the BBC buildings, for two hours.
Talk Audio is the only media partner to have ever had actual active advertising budgets spent on it by the Digital Radio people. For all the other promotional material, be it BBC or BAUER Media, has been by fee-free ‘˜contra’ arrangements of what was deemed to be worth £12million. We were very privileged. I loved the dude D-LOVE and called him my soul brother from another mother.

But it has ways been just a bit lofty, with most manufacturers being treated like they were recalcitrant children who need reining in. And in previous years I have heard the most disparaging things said about whole slews of DAB offerings from the manufacturers from one individual who had no technical clue. For the simple fact is, no government was going to try to force an ageing population to change their radios in their cars as well as their homes. No, it’s been natural wastage, as cars and people die. Bollocks to the 27 million non-DAB cars out there, let them listen to cake.
And tomorrow is all about the latest batch of competing new radio stations and how PURE and Halfords are about to change the game with a new very-much-cheaper DAB adaptor. (and in a lesser way, about how they are ramping up transmitter installations and power to put DAB on a parity with FM coverage.)
Sadly I can tell you that in my brand new car, with DAB, there are HUGE issues with coverage yet. FM parity my fat arse! Great swathes of MOTORWAYS, you know those little, out-of-the-way routes, are simply not covered and the radio sounds like the Northern Working Mens’ Club Bad Microphone gag. All stops and starts. Drives me to anger. GAH! And while it is terribly exciting for the massive outfits, there is vanishingly small need for me to actually attend, I feel.
Hell, if they had EVER let me have an interview with D-LOVE, I might have made more effort! And I get to avoid the urge to tell that one fellow that we ALL thought the ‘˜instructional suggestions to the industry’ at the end of some of his missives in the past, hilarious in their jejune pomposity.
A host of my FB and real chums are in Las Vegas right now for the SEMA show. (Specialty Equipment Manufacturers’ Association, the ‘˜specialty’ being AUTOMOTIVE, obviouslyerr, well, they think it is!) And I wish them all well. Especially snapper Si Gray, who is in an old VW and has driven 4,500 miles in it on the road trip of a lifetime. He seems to have mates in every state. Well brave solo adventure! #50StatesOfSiGray #WhereIsCeeGray #JettaTripUSA
Drive carefully, enjoy your tunes, don’t get nicked.
Adam Rayner On Line Editor!