On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 10:16 +1000, Da Rock wrote: > Ok, if I may go OT a little- what's your opinion of digital? Is it > hard to maintain, because its certainly appears worth it? > > Also what is the difference in equipment for digital? That's a broad question. Digital what? Our ABC has got into digital television over the last few years. According to my inside sources, there's hardly a day goes that they don't have to tinker with it. I'm told that they ripped the whole lot out and put something else in, just a year or so after starting. The old analogue gear hardly needed any attention paid to it, post installation, and you could probably expect a good ten to twenty years life out of some of the equipment. They've had digital radio desks crap out while going live to air, and had to reboot them. Silence ensues... They didn't have that problem with analogue. Now they have a second system, running hot, as a backup. Standard definition digital television is worse than ordinary analogue (it's actually less resolution, freezes and hiccups very badly where you'd not even notice a reception problem with analogue, about the one thing it doesn't have is ghosting, but you'll need good reception to get a signal, anyway). Again, the report coming back from the crew is that looking at high def versus standard definition, there's nothing really noticeably better on the monitors inside the station. The analogue television is getting worse, now. And that's digital's fault. There's extra transmission carriers for the digital television, and we get intermodulation distortion on nearly all channels. For instance, on the few moments where the station broadcasts something quiet (e.g. a lull moment in a movie), you can hear very obvious horrible swishy noises. They're present all the time, but harder to notice. I'm bloody sick of digital video (I work in video production). There's a plethora of incompatible, and usually unidentified formats (signal wise, never mind recording mediums). It's almost guaranteed that there's going to be some sort of conversion done, and that's always bad news for quality (whether that's adc - dac & back again, or between different digital formats). Then there's all the (not really) high definition Plasma and LCD TV sets that look worse than a good quality analogue CRT set, and have a plethora of stupid settings to work through... -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
