Back to the Future

Perhaps one of the most successful marketing campaigns is “digital”. In the public mind digital represents technological improvement and a better product. The alternative is “analog’.

The government and Comcast advertise the reason to move from analog to digital is to free up bandwidth, the amount of information transmitted. Contrary to what you might believe, the less in transmission is not really due to better compression schemes.

Information in the electromagnetic spectrum, such as light and sound, is a wave. A wave is a continuous oscillation and therefore analog. How does digital differ? Imagine you have a scene passing outside your car window as you are riding. You take out your camera and take repeated snap shots in a sequence as you ride. The goal is to take enough snap shots to give the illusion of a continuous image without gaps. Now you have a roll of these snap shots and you take your scissors and cut the very top and bottom off. The rationale, who really focuses on the very top and bottom? All this missing information is marketed to those remotely interested as of no consequence.

Today there is a resurgence of vinyl records. They are analog. They contain far more music information then a digital recording. Audiophiles claim it has better sound. One reason is the inaudible and other parts left out in a digital recording have an impact on the sound you actually hear. This impact is what Audiophiles claim to hear in analog music.

The next in the series of types of communication was known from the start. It is Pulse Modulation or PM. It encapsulates a snap shot of the oscillation. In other words, moving back towards analog and larger bandwidth utilization.

In the 1980s America faced an onslaught of Japanese products that seemed technologically unique and superior. The Japanese had a fully functional high definition television standard. Rather as a patriotic move or racism, President Reagan refused to accede to the Japanese. The Japanese HD died without effective access to the American market. The Japanese standard would have also required American communication companies to increase their bandwidth dramatically to carry the signal. If that had happened, America would not be in the position today of its broadband offering being considered by the rest of the world failing to meet minimum transmission capabilities.  The Reagan hubris resulted in a more than 40 year delay for high definition to take root.

Travel a couple of decades in the future. Look for analog to come back if technically prowess continues.