UK Digital Radio Bitrates

This page was last updated on 29-03-2026

This is a list of BBC and commercial radio stations in the UK, comparing audio bitrates for online streams, including BBC iPlayer, DAB, Freeview and satellite (Sky and Freesat).
Please contact the site with any corrections or additions to this list.

Joint Stereo – Audio mode in which two channels forming a stereo pair (left and right) are encoded within the one-bit stream and for which stereophonic irrelevance or redundancy is exploited for further bit reduction.
Mono LSF (Low Sampling Frequency) – Low bitrate encoding with halved sampling rate.
HE-AAC (High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding) – More efficient high-quality multichannel and stereo audio codec used with DAB+.

Audio codec: MPEG 1 Layer II
Better than FM quality requires 192-256 kbps
Similar to FM quality requires 160-192 kbps
Acceptable, worse than FM 128-160 kbps
(Based on stereo services)

Audio codec: aacPlus v2
Better than FM quality requires 56-96 kbps
Similar to FM quality requires 40-64 kbps
Acceptable, worse than FM 24-48 kbps
(Based on stereo services)

Radio on Freely
Currently only BBC Radio is available on Freely. BBC radio stations are not directly streamed through Freely, listeners are redirected through the BBC Sounds app.

BBC Digital Radio Bitrates

This list of BBC digital radio bitrates is provided in good faith, 100% accuracy can not be guaranteed, as changes periodically occur on the various platforms used by the BBC.
Below are audio bitrate comparisons for the BBC’s national digital radio stations, the nations and BBC London local radio on BBC iPlayer, DAB, Freeview and satellite (Freesat and Sky).
Please email any corrections or additional information and have them included.

UK Commercial Digital Radio Bitrates

This list of UK digital radio bitrates is provided in good faith, 100% accuracy can not be guaranteed, as changes periodically occur on the various platforms used.
Below are audio bitrate comparisons for commercial digital radio stations, Online streams, DAB, Freeview and satellite (Freesat and Sky).
Please email any corrections or additional information and have them included.