Cartoon 692: There is More…

In the media they promote digital by talking about all the bandwidth (space) it will free up being currently taken up by analog transmissions. The question few people ask is how? Typically you think it is a case of better signal efficiency. But digital is a series of snap shots of a transmission. However, the real world is analog. Digital signals are created by chopping up the analog signal and throwing away information from the high and low end of the signal wave. It also throws away a portion of the wave continuum.  What you are left with is a series of smaller “packages” of signals. The discard represents the space freed up by digital transmission.

The rationale is the belief the discarded information is not really needed. The high and low discards are generally outside normal human hearing. Many audiophiles hate this signal loss. They claim something is missing. An analogy: you could write a page of text leaving out most of the modifiers. The grammar might still be correct. But the “color” and much of the intelligence would be missing. Audiophiles are probably right. There is acoustic synergy between the sounds outside of the human hearing range with those that occur inside the human hearing range. Admittedly, the information loss is not an issue with static imagery, such as text or photographs.

The second issue is that the public is encouraged to believe digital is an ultimate approach. Digital is really a transitional approach. We are going to eventually migrate to Pulse Moderation or “PM”. This will mean another whole scale revamping of infra-structure. How soon? This is unknown. Asia will likely “leap frog” into “PM”.