With the exception of KFOG and KUFX, 100% of my audio and visual media is now digital. The promise of the digital age has been delivered in my house and my car.

And it sucks.

Given the choice, I would not trade off the analog artifacts for the digital artifacts, but alas I would have to sacrifice the enormous buffet of content – and what the media lacks in quality it makes up for in volume.

Let’s start with TV. I happen to have DirecTV, but the issue is the same with digital cable. I get a few hundred channels and thank God for Tivo I can navigate my way around them, timeshifting away so I don’t have to tolerate interruptions to my viewing pleasure anymore (like that pesky football game that interrupts all the good Super Bowl commercials – gone!).

Anyway, there are two incredibly BAD artifacts on digital TV. Lossy compression and sloppy encoding lead to constant block artifacts on the screen – I assume this is a combination of DirecTV giving limited bandwidth to the wanky channels I like and a hardware compression solution that is not really optimized for the content. The second artifact is the switching delay. Again because of the compression scheme, it takes a few seconds for the audio and video to assemble when the channel is changed. Remember holding your finger on the channel button on the remote as a kid and seeing the channels flip by? Okay, maybe you don’t, but I do. You could scan all 12 channels in about six seconds. Heaven!

I’ve gotten so used to the channel switching delay that I don’t notice it anymore. Now that I have XM in the car, I get that same switching delay experience when I’m driving.

Until yesterday.

I was listening to KFOG and punched the button to listen to KFOX. BAM! No delay! I was amazed. Like smelling ditto paper, I was transformed back to my youth. Sensory memories kicked in, and the days of analog radio enveloped me. I started hitting the steering wheel button that goes to the next programmed radio station. BAM BAM BAM! New station new station new station no gaps. Ahhhh.

I fear digital radio.