Digital Daftness

It is a disaster.
Our radio and terrestrial television will soon all be digital.
And how we have managed to get caught in such a crazy circumstance, I really do not know. But caught we are, mark my words.

It seems to make such little sense. Explanations about quality of sound leave me cold, in much the same way that expensive Hi-Fi equipment strikes me as pointless overkill. I remember a friend who wanted me to appreciate his new sound system being terribly upset because I didn't. Frankly, it seemed to me that in order to achieve only a relatively small improvement in sound quality, of the sort which few were likely to appreciate unless they had perfect pitch, he had had to pay a disproportionately large cost. There is simply a point at which improvements in 'quality' become meaningless.

Ditto digital braodcasting. Last year on holiday we kept company with an ugly new digital radio. It was ugly in more than one way. For one thing it was expensive. And then its design was dreadful - I know these things can be very subjective, but why do digital radios have to look odd? We have been making and designing portable radios for years, and over time come up with some really quite attractive designs: why, I wonder, does it seem that all digital radio boxes have to give the impression that their makers have completely forgotten everything mankind might have learned about radio design in the last century?

But there is something much worse. In return for receiving a signal which comes and goes as it pleases - forever breaking up - the darned things use so much power! That radio used up six large batteries a day. I have a small, unpretentious AM/FM radio which will work for weeks of the same sort of use on two much smaller cells..... It was so costly that digital radio became the reason for having no radio at all. I suspect much the same is true of digital TV - it is certainly true of things like the new digital hearing aids. The folk here who use them here all tell me the same thing: they are smaller, and perhaps they sound is better, but the batteries do not last anything like so long as they did with the older hearing aids.

In the age of Conservation and global warming, this is Progress?

As always, the question is Cui bono?
Not me the consumer, not at the moment anyway.
The supposedly wonderful proliferation of television channels has not benefitted me in the least. It seems merely to have diluted the quality of television programmes, and made television strive to become an inescapable 24 hour accompaniment to daily life. Wherein even the News is dreary. Condemned to sit on screen for hours on end repeating the same 'exciting' news items, BBC presenters (and they are hardly alone) have developed a mesmerising way of speech, slurring their words, and dragging out comments (pass over their grammar and misuse of words) which is simply a travesty.

It used to happen on rare instances, where a presenter intended to link with an outside broadcast reporter at the scene of some event, that unexpected delay left the presenter struggling for words, repeating themselves, or speaking.... with..errm..... gaps... in .. their....com...mentary - as they worked out whether to wait or pass quickly on to another item, and return to this later.... But now, that once rare occurence has become the standard style of communication!


No, I don't think the hundreds of new digital channels have really benefitted me much at all.

The folk I think who have benefitted, are the people who make new radios and television screens; and those who retail them. And the folk who can now put the sort of programmes which attract a high demand - like football competitions and Test matches - on specialist channels for which one must pay extra. They have probably been a boon to government too, selling all those extra franchises for fat fees. Maybe they have benefitted advertisers as well - more and cheaper advertising on more channels. It was, I dare guess, from such quarters that the real demand for digital broadcasting came. Once the large broadcasters, and a significant slice of industry, have decided that digital is the way to go, few governments would have been able to resist their pressure for ever greater profit.

But they have not benefitted me at all.
I don't imagine they ever will.