Crystal Palace Transmitter

Feek · 18 Apr 2012 at 12:04

The end of a broadcasting era.

A superior product replaced by an inferior one and because it contains the word 'digital' and gets hyped beyond believe, everyone automatically thinks it's better. Digital is not necessarily better than analogue.

El_Watcher · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:09

Feek said:
Digital is not necessarily better than analogue.

Can you please give me some reasons why digital is not better than analogue? As far as I see, there is much more channel choice, picture quality is better (especially where HD channels are available), and now they are disabling analogue, the signal strength should be much better, so less people can moan they can't receive a good signal.

Jonny69 · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:15

Feek said:
The end of a broadcasting era.

A strange feeling of emptiness came over me when the television came on this morning and there was no broadcast. I can't put my finger on what it felt like, but I think of you slept through an apocalypse and woke up to find everybody gone and no broadcasts it might come close.

Feek said:
A superior product replaced by an inferior one and because it contains the word 'digital' and gets hyped beyond believe, everyone automatically thinks it's better. Digital is not necessarily better than analogue.

Now, I thought I was alone in thinking this. We used to get an amazing picture on analogue and the same channels look terrible through the digibox. I've been told I need a better digibox but it makes no difference through the cheapy Panasonic one or the Humax, both are noticeably inferior in picture quality to the analogue signal.

I don't particularly like having technology forced on me and this is the first time I've had to make changes to my life to accommodate it. Essentially, my alarm clock telly now doesn't work, because it's not digital and won't switch on to the AV input, and the old B&W that we used to use in the kitchen won't work unless I buy (and can find) a digibox with an aerial signal output because it doesn't have SCART.

My point: what a complete waste of resources and expense having to buy a load of new equipment :rolleyes:

Hagar · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:24

Perhaps you can now catch up with the rest of the country who have had digital only for a year or more. No complaints here.

There will be a few retunes to capture better signals, I did this once a week for a few weeks after switchover.

Efour · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:24

Change/Progress has to happen at some point. I've never really thought about it but i guess the main reason for the swap is so there is more "bandwidth, dunno if thats the right term? available for more advert filled **** channels? :O

Feek · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:28

El_Watcher said:
Can you please give me some reasons why digital is not better than analogue? As far as I see, there is much more channel choice, picture quality is better (especially where HD channels are available), and now they are disabling analogue, the signal strength should be much better, so less people can moan they can't receive a good signal.

- my bold

You have been brainwashed into believing that digital picture quality is better than analogue. The limited bandwidth which is being forced on the digital channels means that the picture quality will never be as good as a solid analogue signal.

A stronger digital signal does not improve the quality.

It's the same with analogue radio vs DAB. DAB audio quality can never match a solid analogue FM broadcast for quality, the bandwidth is far too limited.

Jonny, I'm with you.

Feek · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:31

nkata said:
Perhaps you can now catch up with the rest of the country who have had digital only for a year or more. No complaints here.

There will be a few retunes to capture better signals, I did this once a week for a few weeks after switchover.

It doesn't matter whether a digital signal is just above the threshold or incredibly strong, the picture quality will be the same. If you get a picture now, retuning to get a stronger signal won't improve the quality.

It might stop the odd drop out but the actual picture quality won't change.

PiKe · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:31

Mmm macro-blocking.

horrorwood · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:38

To me freeview picture quality has always looked better than analogue. Maybe I am mad? :confused:

Liquid_Entity · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:41

As if anyone is going to see any lightshow in this weather !!!!!

Burnsy2023 · 18 Apr 2012 at 13:46

Feek said:
- my bold

You have been brainwashed into believing that digital picture quality is better than analogue. The limited bandwidth which is being forced on the digital channels means that the picture quality will never be as good as a solid analogue signal.

A stronger digital signal does not improve the quality.

It's the same with analogue radio vs DAB. DAB audio quality can never match a solid analogue FM broadcast for quality, the bandwidth is far too limited.

Jonny, I'm with you.

The picture quality will be better if you take HDTV into account though. Anyway, I'd rather have the spectrum for 4g than having a slightly better TV picture.

ci_newman · 18 Apr 2012 at 14:01

Feek said:
- my bold

You have been brainwashed into believing that digital picture quality is better than analogue. The limited bandwidth which is being forced on the digital channels means that the picture quality will never be as good as a solid analogue signal.

A stronger digital signal does not improve the quality.

It's the same with analogue radio vs DAB. DAB audio quality can never match a solid analogue FM broadcast for quality, the bandwidth is far too limited.

Jonny, I'm with you.

There are some advantages with going to the new frequency range though, such as a wider range of channels. In my local area, I get maybe half a dozen FM radio stations. With DAB, I get three times this amount.

Whilst I agree that the standard defintion picture quality is not as good, all of the analogue TV channels are now (or will shortly be) available in HD on both DVB-S and DVB-T anyway, negating this.

If you exclude the extra cost of hardware, we will have a good picture on the top-5 channels, with a variety of other channels all available for free.

Yamahahahahaha · 18 Apr 2012 at 15:51

Looking forward to the switchover, I shall take pictures if I'm able!

As for analogue vs. digital:
Analogue transmissions are very inefficient in terms of channel separation.
You do get better quality, but the number of channels you can have is far fewer.
With audio and video codecs improving all the time, it may be perfectly feasible to have 10 extremely high quality streams in the same frequency band that one analogue stream occupied.

DAB was and is a lame duck. Offering extremely poor quality audio vs. even the worst analogue transmissions. Who cares about 100 channels if they all sound bad?
The sooner DAB is replaced with something of higher quality (realistically, at least 256kbit VBR audio), the better.

KIA · 18 Apr 2012 at 17:55

Yay for Freeview HD on the PC!

FreeStream · 18 Apr 2012 at 23:55

Feek said:
- my bold

You have been brainwashed into believing that digital picture quality is better than analogue. The limited bandwidth which is being forced on the digital channels means that the picture quality will never be as good as a solid analogue signal.

A stronger digital signal does not improve the quality.

It's the same with analogue radio vs DAB. DAB audio quality can never match a solid analogue FM broadcast for quality, the bandwidth is far too limited.

Jonny, I'm with you.

Having not seen an analogue TV picture for the best part of 4 years (Bristol switched over a while back and I've never bothered tuning my TVs to analogue). But there is no way that analogue was better than HDTV.

However, having watched football on ITV1 on analogue and digital ages ago, the digital was bloody awful, and still is.

Need to get rid of all the other **** channels and give the main channels more BW!

Cosimo · 19 Apr 2012 at 12:13

Did anyone get to see the light show?

Ev0 · 19 Apr 2012 at 12:33

Jonny69 said:
the old B&W that we used to use in the kitchen won't work unless I buy (and can find) a digibox with an aerial signal output because it doesn't have SCART

I have a Panasonic TUCT30 with an RF out that might be going spare if you did want one for the cost of the postage?

semi-pro waster · 19 Apr 2012 at 13:28

simulatorman said:
Did anyone get to see the light show?

Yep, I took a wander along and watched it for about 5 minutes from a road behind the tower. I probably should have thought about it a bit more and realised that there would be 10-15 minutes of talking first which delayed the whole thing.

The light show itself was not bad but I think I would have been a bit less than overawed if I'd had to travel any great distance to see it and there were quite a few people sitting in cars watching along the road. I've got a few fairly rubbish pictures from my phone camera which I might try and stick up but my FTP wasn't playing ball yesterday.

semi-pro waster · 19 Apr 2012 at 18:38

It's not really worth the wait but here's a few of the pictures I took anyway:

If anything the fact that it was a misty and slightly rainy night made it more atmospheric but it also upset the phone for focusing properly.

Crystal Palace Transmitter

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