The innovation behind the mechanically encoded television never improved very much at all, however it fueled a race to offer a better product which resulted in the electronic based CRT television that defined an era.
Yes, and with that, I think you missed the point of my reply.
You stated "Basically if you aren't excited for Digital, even if only to have new things to fiddle with, you are probably old".
Well, I'm old, I guess, and I'm not really excited about digital but age or attitude really has nothing to do with it.
Example: I'm in the public safety radio business, and have gone through several iterations of transition from analog to digital. In the microwave world, that was easy. It really was a big improvement. In the LMR side of things, well... What to say to all those customers who are complaining about crappy audio quality? P25 audio sounds bad to a lot of people. It's hard to get excited over it.
I know of ham radio repeaters where one of the design goals is to have superb audio quality. A great deal of attention is paid to levels and frequency response and noise, and when you can switch from the input to the output of a repeater and not be able to tell the difference in quality of the signal, that's an accomplishment. Especially when you can do it across a few spans in a linked system.
You can't do that on digital. It starts off sounding mechanical, and it stays that way.
So, for some of us, it's not going to be a priority. Commercial LMR is going digital, not because it sounds better, but because of the need to squeeze more channels into less space.
Ham radio doesn't have that immediate need, so the driving force is something else. Usually, the motivator is "it's different, it's new".
That's fine, if that's one of the design goals. But if the design goal is actual audio quality, well, you're gonna have to try something else.
This is a strawman argument. With the ability of digital radio to distribute occupied bandwidth, you cannot compare it to analogue radio bandwidth.
No. Take Nyquists law... The sample rate must be twice the highest frequency to be sampled in order to get a reasonably correct digital sample of an analog wave form. In telephony, that was a 4 KHz audio channel, sampled 8 thousand times a second. Converted to an 8 bit word, that becomes a 64 kb serial data stream. Much harder to transport than a simple 4 KHz wide audio channel, in terms of spectrum occupancy.
P25 is about a 3 KHz bw sampled and compressed to a 4800 bps, so what you end up with is a mathematical reproduction of what was once the original wave form. The benefit is a 4.8 kb rate, not almost 64kb. The cost is poor reproduction of the waveform.
This excites some people.
people who explore the limits of mature standards often realize if we push our exploitation of it we wind up with a new tool for accomplishing a new goal. I cannot emphasize how much of the progress of mankind was achieved through mistakes, tangential research, tinkering, or boredom with a set standard driving people to challenge themselves to make it interesting again.
I absolutely agree with you. And some guys want to push that envelope. But other guys might want to push a different envelope, just not the digital envelope. That doesn't automatically make them dinosaurs. There are guys tinkering and building radios that work at 47 GHz and higher, and in the next room is their all tube vintage station including ex-broadcast AM transmitter running a handful of 833 tubes. Those guys are innovative, and have little interest in digital.
Until the first batch of guys finishes it, and ends up with natural sounding audio in a 4 KHz time slot, guys like me will still be running analog on the systems specifically designed to have natural sounding audio - because that's the damned design goal!
This is patently untrue. Networks of repeaters built off their digitized I/O carried over various protocols are not new. This is just untrue.
Amateur networks have been around for 100 years. Digital networks made with DMR and NXDN and P25 radios are a relatively new phenomenon.
There is nothing stopping you from enjoying non-digital new stuff along side the new digital stuff. I advocate playing with everything new.
I would only modify that to say I advocate playing with everything new that interests you.
On my desk is an Avid Eleven Rack tube amp emulator. Under my desk is a Mesa/Boogie .50 Caliber + tube amp. At no point have I felt that I should try to convince people having both is somehow worse than only having one.
I'm no stranger to the tube vs solid state arguments with audio gear.
When you go bar hopping...
You lost me. I don't. :lol:
Interesting discussion! I've enjoyed it, but spent entirely too much time on it.
