This is a blog really, but I'm just posting it on the front page because there's been no news for a while...

Sometimes, technology can overrun. Certain points are reached at which, essentially, the technology is perfect – it does exactly what us unchanging, un-evolving, ham-fisted bipeds need it to do to the most perfect degree, at which point anyone sensible would simply say "there, that's done" and just sit back and enjoy it. A spade is still a spade, no matter how many different shapes and materials you make it in.

Of course industry, in its wisdom, is never ready to pack up and go home – it has to keep working – so it pushes ever forward, tweaking this, "improving" that, until that moment of perfection is long since forgotten and we all merrily march into the shops and buy new products that are just that little bit worse than before. That's the "progress" that old people like to mutter to each other about, and the older I get, the more I see their point. I suppose that’s the way it goes.

I cite as my first exhibit, the Roberts R606-MB, pictured above. Crafted in England from teak, leather-faced cloth, and some solid and reliable electronics back in the mid seventies, the R606 is a high quality, portable, transistor radio. It didn’t change the world and nobody downed tools when it first ran off the production line, declaring radio design a finished art – but all the same, it marks one of those points where, for all intents, technology had achieved its aim. For the purposes of producing a radio to be placed in a kitchen, or perhaps taken out on the odd picnic once in a while, the R606 is perfection – the supreme distillation of decades of radio technology, all refined into one complete, perfect product.

I picked one of these up from the dump ("local recycling centre") a few months ago. It wasn’t in perfect nick, the shiny caps were missing from a couple of controls, and when I plugged it in it struggled to work on the mains, because the built-in AC adaptor had packed up. Because of the brilliant way this radio is designed internally – components are neatly divided into clearly identifiable, accessible modules that can be easily removed, repaired or replaced by anyone with a soldering iron, I probably could and will fix this in time. For now though, it still takes batteries, so the radio still works. And thirty years after it was made, it still works beautifully, with a rich tone from its big speaker, set into that warm wooden cabinet. Like the best radios, the whole unit is essentially one big, quality speaker in a spacious cabinet which just happens to have its own tuner and amplifier tucked away inside.

It has all the latest technology of the mid seventies, including new-fangled FM, a massive telescopic aerial to receive it on, and an auto-frequency tuning (AFT) button to keep your favourite station locked in. It also has both Medium Wave and Long Wave (MW and LW, no AM here), all tuned in with a big friendly dial which has various stations helpfully marked for your convenience – Radio 4 is still exactly where it says it should be on LW, and its that I have it tuned into most of the time. LW is a forgotten signal now, most new tuners don’t even cover it, and R4 is pretty much the only English language station you’ll find broadcasting – but broadcast it does, and it still comes in loud and clear on the R606. No need for the telescopic aerial either. LW has a warm, rich sound to it – not detailed enough for music, which is best suited to the clarity of FM, but just perfect for talk radio.

You turn the R606 on with a satisfying "clunk" of the volume dial, change band with buttons that go "click", spin the tuner until the needle smoothly glides into place on your favourite station, perhaps move one of the thoughtfully provided marker flags to note its position for later... and then relax.

YukNow, compare this wholesome, idyllic radio experience with what we're being sold now – plastic, digital radios. While LW has been around for a hundred years and the R606 for thirty, DAB is just ten years old, still struggling to find widespread acceptance, and already under real threat of being scrapped for a newer digital technology such as DAB+ - potentially leaving thousands of sets abandoned. As it is, it's just one of various competing digital standards in use around the world - take a DAB radio on your holidays, and you'll most likely hear nothing on it.

Even the best quality DAB radio – and Roberts do make them – can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and DAB's sound quality is quantifiably worse than FM. It carries more stations, but only by compressing them all to a low bitrate that means music on DAB will never sound as detailed as FM, nor speech sound as warm as any analogue band. And although the technology provides the means for all those extra stations, it can't provide the demand - hence all the commercial offerings on DAB are bilge, attracting no listeners, and going out of business one by one (goodbye Oneword, Planet Rock, The Jazz). Only the BBC can sustain anyone's interest in DAB with a couple of exclusive stations like BBC7 and 6Music, one of which merely repeats programming from its bigger brothers on analogue, and both of which could be easily accomodated back on FM and MW.

Inside your DAB radio you'll find only complex, integrated circuits that can't be programmed outside the factory, let alone repaired - at least without a microscope. Like most modern technology they're designed to be disposable, so when a 50p component goes, your £50 radio goes straight in the bin, beyond economic repair. And there's another minor ecological problem with DAB, and indeed any form of digital radio - it takes more power, since it's not just tuning into a signal but also processing a data stream. Hence the fact that my R606 has lasted months on the same set of batteries, but when I tried to do the same with our DAB set (which took bigger batteries to begin with) it lasted about three days of the same regular use. The simplest analogue radio (a crystal set) requires no power at all, but now our latest radio technology requires much more power than any radio we've ever developed before - when you think about that, in a global context, it seems like absolute madness.

So what's my point? Simply that technology has, in the case of radio, overrun. We never needed DAB, or anything like it; the spade was already the right shape when they were turning out R606s, which thirty years later still do their job better than anything you're likely to find in Curry's today. So the question is, what are we all doing, and is it too late to stop?