Pure’s director of marketing Colin Crawford is a man on a mission - to tell as many people as possible that when they buy a radio it should be able to receive digital broadcasts.
 
This is why Pure recently produced trade and consumer booklets that try to “dispel radio switchover myths”.
 
But, however good and fair the guide may be - and it is good and fair - it is inevitably devalued because it has been produced by a single manufacturer, rather than an independent government or trade body.
 
“It would have to have gone through committees, and we needed to do something urgently to counter what people have been saying and writing about 2015,” says Mr Crawford.
 
“The date 2015 is a distraction. It’s not important. It’s irrelevant. What matters is that switchover is going to happen. And when people buy radios, they expect them to still be working in 10 or 20 years.”
 
“What’s certain is that radio can’t remain analogue; and it can’t be replaced by the internet, because IP cannot deliver mass media. A mix of DAB and FM and the internet is the future. The date it happens does not matter.”
 
Mr Crawford is obviously cross about the way the press - myself included - keep referring to 2015 cut-off.
 
We do it because the recent government Digital Economy Act is as clear as mud on analogue radio shutdown, but government “explanatory notes”, coupled with last year’s Digital Britain report, gave the clear message that if there is 50 per cent digital listening by 2013, analogue stations like Radio 3 and Radio 4 will switch off in 2015.
 
That’s a nice clear message to get people to buy digital radios, and if we keep adding maybes and saying perhaps, the message is lost.
 
“The 2013 date is aspirational,” says Mr Crawford, while conceding, “it will be very hard to hit.”
 
Obviously choosing his words carefully, Mr Crawford agrees that the BBC hardly helped encourage consumers to buy DAB radios by announcing plans to chop the Radio 6 music station.  On the glass-half-full principle, he thinks “it might not be a bad thing in the long run because the suggestion has generated passion - people love their radios and get very vocal - and the plan now has to go to the BBC Trust”.
 
“What really matters is that when someone goes into a dealer this weekend, the sales staff have to tell them that if it’s analogue-only, it is going to stop working in a few years,” says Mr Crawford.
 
The UK would surely have done better to follow France and simply pass a law saying that in a couple of years all radios sold must be able to receive digits.
 
That’s what the French did with Scart sockets, and it made the flaky Scart plug a de facto standard for the whole of Europe.

Barry Fox