What's so cool about "analog"?

[Nusa]

Analog TV was in many ways superior, I haven't watched broadcast TV in quite a few years but I played with it when digital first appeared and marveled at the picture quality when conditions were ideal but when they are not ideal the picture drops out completely  or gets severely distorted with the audio cutting out and that is far more annoying than a little snow. It's largely the reason portable TVs are not really a thing anymore. Given most people don't even know you can receive HD channels over the air I think they should have just kept the analog broadcasts going and used digital on cable and satellite services. Billions of perfectly good devices were rendered next to useless when analog was switched off and for what?

The real business goal here was to reclaim the large amount of bandwidth that analog channels required for many more digital channels.

As for perfectly good analog-only devices, the irony here is that basic cable boxes still support them! Digital to the box and tuner, analog to the TV.

[james_s]

The real business goal here was to reclaim the large amount of bandwidth that analog channels required for many more digital channels.

As for perfectly good analog-only devices, the irony here is that basic cable boxes still support them! Digital to the box and tuner, analog to the TV.

Sure but most of what I'm talking about are all the portable TVs, digital is useless for portable for the reasons I mentioned. Then there is the annoying slow tuning, younger folks might not remember how you used to be able to rapidly flip between channels, now most TVs/boxes take a second to a few seconds to lock after each tuning step, it's annoying.

[tggzzz]

Think,of analog TV vs digital…
You remember the ‘ghosts’ of multi path reception..?

Moving to digital brought the  ‘digital cliff’ which introduced the concept of it works, or it doesn’t.

The signal integrity is guaranteed from end to end with digital, but may be compromised in a million ways with an analog signal.

Apart from reflections, consider noise, gai and other transient interruptions and distortion if the input signal before it gets to the output.

Not quite. Poor signal integrity occurs for, amongst others, the reasons you mention in your last paragraph.

Digital fails when there is poor signal integrity, even if there is good signal strength; hence the "signal strength" and "signal quality" indicators.

It is normal to use analogue measurements to assess and assure signal integrity in a system, and once assured, flip to using digital measurements in the digital signal domain.

[tggzzz]

The real business goal here was to reclaim the large amount of bandwidth that analog channels required for many more digital channels.

It was noticeable that, when TV companies had a choice between improved pictures and more channels, they mostly choose more channels. That's because in their mind, more channels => more advertising slots => more revenue.

That was shortsighted of course, since it opens the door to other industries with higher resolution pictures. Fortunately in the UK there are eight free over-the-air HD channels available.

[Siwastaja]

Analog TV was in many ways superior, I haven't watched broadcast TV in quite a few years but I played with it when digital first appeared and marveled at the picture quality when conditions were ideal

It's the usual story of greed. I remember the early days of DVB here, in early years of 2000. During late 1990's, analog cable services replaced terrestrial at higher rate anybody expected, except for countryside of course. Analog TV picture quality was at its peak in year 2000. (Here, compared to the USA, it helps to know PAL has a tad higher definition and absence of color shifts, compared to NTSC; at the expense of more flickery picture due to only 50Hz refresh rate.) Picture quality was basically just fine. Only SD, but equivalent to approx. 500x550 pixels, and with absolutely no compression artifacts.

But exactly because the lack of compression, analog requires so much bandwidth. With digital, you can do all fancy tricks like running macroblocks through discrete cosine transformation to remove a lot of data with only minor perceivable difference. Better yet, you can compare adjacent frames and calculate motion vectors so that full image data doesn't need to be stored in every frame. Compared to analog, this is quite some UFO tech. Those days, the compression standard was called MPEG-2, and the bottom line, as shown by the official DVB design documents, it could squeeze the required bandwidth down by 50%-66%, enabling one TV channel to be replaced by 2-3 without perceivable degradation in image quality. That's just HUGE.

But then, enter the greed. Instead of 5-6 channels (for a small country) with mediocre to good content, what if we come up with 10-15 channels more, they can just broadcast teleshopping infomercials and other crap you can get broadcasting rights to for basically free because no one wants to watch it.

So we ended up with bundles where one analog TV channel was replaced with 8-10 MPEG-2 DVB channels, for which the system was not engineered for. So the image quality dropped to something comparable to a video CD, or early day Youtube, and it did not take many years to Youtube actually surpass the TV image quality.

Simultaneously, enter massive technical problems regarding soft subtitles, screen aspect ratios, reliability in general - and of course people who cared about technical details (for example, wanted to enjoy a good movie) were extremely pissed - the whole DVB transition made the television technically worse than what analog was.

And it was all because of greedy management and their stupid ideas - not digital transmission itself.

[jonovid]

if the world was digital it would be like minecraft only at a higher resolution.

[magic]

Fortunately in the UK there are eight free over-the-air HD channels available.

Do you mean the channels you are forced to buy when they find out that you own a TV?

[tggzzz]

Fortunately in the UK there are eight free over-the-air HD channels available.

Do you mean the channels you are forced to buy when they find out that you own a TV?

Any device used as a TV, actually Most people - other than politicians - are grateful for them and think they are an important part of local culture.

I made a mistake; there are 9 freeview channels, 5 of which are not BBC.

[tooki]

And try mentioning MOSFETs to the youngsters of today, & they think you are referring to big, clunky power switching devices. Most of my old ham stuff has a multitude of dual gate MOSFETs  in the RF/IF.

Oh please. I hate hearing people talk down about young people. There’s no reason to make that assumption. I think it’s reasonable to assume that anyone learning EE now is going to learn that the CMOS technology practically all modern ICs are made with are based on the MOSFET.

[m k]

Fortunately in the UK there are eight free over-the-air HD channels available.

Do you mean the channels you are forced to buy when they find out that you own a TV?

Here we pay also for their web content.
Taxman is collecting and it's a separated line in tax assessment.
It's also progressive so lowest income folks are not paying but I wouldn't say they are avoiding it.

And broadcast signal itself is still analog, and contains parallel data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_multiplexing
https://rfmw.em.keysight.com/wireless/helpfiles/89600b/webhelp/subsystems/wlan-ofdm/content/ofdm_basicprinciplesoverview.htm

[rsjsouza]

And try mentioning MOSFETs to the youngsters of today, & they think you are referring to big, clunky power switching devices. Most of my old ham stuff has a multitude of dual gate MOSFETs  in the RF/IF.

Oh please. I hate hearing people talk down about young people. There’s no reason to make that assumption. I think it’s reasonable to assume that anyone learning EE now is going to learn that the CMOS technology practically all modern ICs are made with are based on the MOSFET.

I agree. You would be surprised of how many interns and new hires on my company have deep roots in analog design.

[coppice]

Think,of analog TV vs digital…
You remember the ‘ghosts’ of multi path reception..?

I'm not sure of your point there. In the last years of analogue TV they used DSP techniques, akin to echo cancellation, to remove the ghosts from analogue TV signals, so it became a non-issue.

[james_s]

I agree. You would be surprised of how many interns and new hires on my company have deep roots in analog design.

A few years ago I interviewed at a place that was having a great deal of trouble finding young grads with any analog background. I ended up pulling out due to the commute it would have been, and I was surprised they sounded disappointed and said I was easily the most qualified candidate despite not being a degreed engineer. Maybe things have changed but for a while at least finding young people with an interest in analog really was difficult. Everyone wants to play with microcontrollers.

[coppice]

I agree. You would be surprised of how many interns and new hires on my company have deep roots in analog design.

How does an intern have deep roots in anything? Do you have middle aged interns?

[snarkysparky]

One thing about digital.  A signal can be transmitted noise free for any arbitrary distance.   It just needs repeaters to reliably recover the data stream from the acquired noise and retransmit a brand spanking new fresh copy.

I don't actually think this is true but it's sonethin to think about

[TimFox]

One thing about digital.  A signal can be transmitted noise free for any arbitrary distance.   It just needs repeaters to reliably recover the data stream from the acquired noise and retransmit a brand spanking new fresh copy.

I don't actually think this is true but it's sonethin to think about

For digital transmission down a long noisy path, some type of error correction is required to recover and re-transmit the data reliably:  this can reduce the error rate to an acceptable level (but not zero).

[rsjsouza]

I agree. You would be surprised of how many interns and new hires on my company have deep roots in analog design.

How does an intern have deep roots in anything? Do you have middle aged interns?

Hahahaha! I guess I used the wrong expression. What I meant was that not only they had their feet wet in analog (worked in labs and had discrete design experience) but had the eagerness to learn on that area.

Quite a few mentioned they liked analog simply due to digital exhaustion: it seems that, since everyone was talking digital, they saw this as an opportunity to have a differentiated expertise.

One detail, though: the number of "analog" new people was still a fraction of the "digital" people.

[james_s]

It's the usual story of greed. I remember the early days of DVB here, in early years of 2000. During late 1990's, analog cable services replaced terrestrial at higher rate anybody expected, except for countryside of course. Analog TV picture quality was at its peak in year 2000. (Here, compared to the USA, it helps to know PAL has a tad higher definition and absence of color shifts, compared to NTSC; at the expense of more flickery picture due to only 50Hz refresh rate.) Picture quality was basically just fine. Only SD, but equivalent to approx. 500x550 pixels, and with absolutely no compression artifacts.

But exactly because the lack of compression, analog requires so much bandwidth. With digital, you can do all fancy tricks like running macroblocks through discrete cosine transformation to remove a lot of data with only minor perceivable difference. Better yet, you can compare adjacent frames and calculate motion vectors so that full image data doesn't need to be stored in every frame. Compared to analog, this is quite some UFO tech. Those days, the compression standard was called MPEG-2, and the bottom line, as shown by the official DVB design documents, it could squeeze the required bandwidth down by 50%-66%, enabling one TV channel to be replaced by 2-3 without perceivable degradation in image quality. That's just HUGE.

But then, enter the greed. Instead of 5-6 channels (for a small country) with mediocre to good content, what if we come up with 10-15 channels more, they can just broadcast teleshopping infomercials and other crap you can get broadcasting rights to for basically free because no one wants to watch it.

So we ended up with bundles where one analog TV channel was replaced with 8-10 MPEG-2 DVB channels, for which the system was not engineered for. So the image quality dropped to something comparable to a video CD, or early day Youtube, and it did not take many years to Youtube actually surpass the TV image quality.

Simultaneously, enter massive technical problems regarding soft subtitles, screen aspect ratios, reliability in general - and of course people who cared about technical details (for example, wanted to enjoy a good movie) were extremely pissed - the whole DVB transition made the television technically worse than what analog was.

And it was all because of greedy management and their stupid ideas - not digital transmission itself.

I remember the first time I saw a PAL-50 TV I *really* noticed the flicker, but I suppose it's one of those things you get used to when you see it all the time, and I have always been sensitive to flicker. The PAL color encoding was arguably superior, although in practice by the 80s or so TVs had gotten good enough so as to make this much less of an issue, NTSC analog TVs could have very good color, and once you set the tint control properly it was stable and not something you had to mess with again. PAL still had the advantage of not having this adjustment at all and not needing it but all things considered I don't think one system was clearly superior to the other, they both did the job.

I have noticed that with digital as well, instead of offering a high definition picture they tend to cram in more channels. The same is true of the "HD Radio" in the USA which is largely a scam, not being high quality at all, but just allowing more channels to be crammed into the same bandwidth, and the kicker is that here it is a totally closed proprietary system that never really caught on outside of car radios.

[daqq]

I never understood why people seem so fascinated with "analog".

If you have to ask the question, you wouldn't understand the answer.

[vk6zgo]

And try mentioning MOSFETs to the youngsters of today, & they think you are referring to big, clunky power switching devices. Most of my old ham stuff has a multitude of dual gate MOSFETs  in the RF/IF.

Oh please. I hate hearing people talk down about young people. There’s no reason to make that assumption. I think it’s reasonable to assume that anyone learning EE now is going to learn that the CMOS technology practically all modern ICs are made with are based on the MOSFET.

It was a bit "tongue in cheek", harking back to "The Three Yorkshiremen", but I was referring to discrete MOSFETs.

Over the time I have been on this forum, I have not seen any reference to MOSFETs in that context here, (apart from when I have referred to them), other than the power devices.

[Siwastaja]

I remember the first time I saw a PAL-50 TV I *really* noticed the flicker, but I suppose it's one of those things you get used to when you see it all the time, and I have always been sensitive to flicker. The PAL color encoding was arguably superior, although in practice by the 80s or so TVs had gotten good enough so as to make this much less of an issue, NTSC analog TVs could have very good color, and once you set the tint control properly it was stable and not something you had to mess with again. PAL still had the advantage of not having this adjustment at all and not needing it but all things considered I don't think one system was clearly superior to the other, they both did the job.

Yeah, I guess the "Never The Same Color" issue was pretty much solved, well enough for casual viewer anyway. There was also PAL60, basically with North American B&W timing (resolution and refresh rate) but with PAL color system. And my TV supported it so I did some side-by-side visual comparisons. The 50Hz flicker wasn't so bad IMHO, and I really liked the better resolution of PAL. In digital terms, NTSC content was produced in 640x480, and PAL content in 768x576.

I could guess that CRT tubes designed for 50Hz market used slower phosphors to compensate for the flicker, but I'm not sure. In any case, a computer CRT monitor at 60Hz seemed to flicker more than a CRT TV at 50Hz - definitely a phosphor difference!

I think, IIRC, different countries also had different bandwidths (and different color carrier frequencies) for the picture, affecting horizontal resolution, UK being the best where good analog signal really was pretty close to uncompressed digital 768x576. So digital television was a real image quality degradation for many, which lasted for a long time before HD channels become commonplace. And still with HD, greed dominates and bitrate might be just too slow - looks great for stationary images, but add a lot of movement, changing texture like rain, and the quality totally breaks apart below the old analog TV.

[tooki]

And try mentioning MOSFETs to the youngsters of today, & they think you are referring to big, clunky power switching devices. Most of my old ham stuff has a multitude of dual gate MOSFETs  in the RF/IF.

Oh please. I hate hearing people talk down about young people. There’s no reason to make that assumption. I think it’s reasonable to assume that anyone learning EE now is going to learn that the CMOS technology practically all modern ICs are made with are based on the MOSFET.

It was a bit "tongue in cheek", harking back to "The Three Yorkshiremen", but I was referring to discrete MOSFETs.

Over the time I have been on this forum, I have not seen any reference to MOSFETs in that context here, (apart from when I have referred to them), other than the power devices.

Well, honestly, isn’t that completely sensible? Where else would you use a discrete MOSFET these days? Even the smallest modern MOSFETs can switch surprisingly large currents, and for signals, you’re unlikely to use a discrete transistor (of any kind). Ham radio is a vanishingly small part of electronics these days. Heck, outside of digital wireless protocols (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, lorawan, etc), all of which we implement using off-the-shelf modules, radio is of practically no importance in modern electronics.

[tooki]

I could guess that CRT tubes designed for 50Hz market used slower phosphors to compensate for the flicker, but I'm not sure. In any case, a computer CRT monitor at 60Hz seemed to flicker more than a CRT TV at 50Hz - definitely a phosphor difference!

Maybe, but I doubt it. I think it’s more that the types of images we viewed on computer CRTs — documents, data, user interfaces — make us notice the flicker more. Video masks flicker to an extent.

[tooki]

In digital terms, NTSC content was produced in 640x480, and PAL content in 768x576.

No. Digital NTSC video was 720x480.

[Siwastaja]

In digital terms, NTSC content was produced in 640x480, and PAL content in 768x576.

No. Digital NTSC video was 720x480.

No. Digital video has always been produced in many different resolutions, including 640x480 (NTSC), 720x480 (NTSC), 720x576 (PAL) and 768x576 (PAL) being some of the most typical. There is no single resolution.

The purpose of my comment, which you took outside of context, was to explain the bandwidth difference in digital terms. PAL has higher video bandwidth which also translates into slightly better horizontal resolution, so using more pixels for it makes sense. 640x480 (NTSC) and 768x576 (PAL) happen to use square pixels for 4:3 material, which makes them less confusing. Their horizontal pixel count difference also roughly captures the analog performance difference.

Towards end of the SD video era, most formats and processed converged to 720x480 or 720x576. Neither have square pixels.