{"id":33,"date":"2005-02-22T11:32:35","date_gmt":"2005-02-22T19:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.anirama.com\/blog\/2005\/02\/analog-faaast-digital-slooow\/"},"modified":"2014-03-31T08:57:23","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T15:57:23","slug":"analog-faaast-digital-slooow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/2005\/02\/22\/uncategorized\/analog-faaast-digital-slooow\/","title":{"rendered":"Analog Faaast, Digital Slooow"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

And it sucks.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> 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!).<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Until yesterday.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I fear digital radio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2518,"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/2518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anirama.com\/newdesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}