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Are You Being Cheated by Digital Cable?
Lauren Weinstein writes "Even though your cable company may claim that a channel is in a digital tier that you're paying for, they may be sending it to you in analog form, with associated negative effects. Surprise! Are You Being Cheated by Digital Cable? 'You're paying for digital, you should get digital. Outside of the lower video and audio quality that can be present on many analog feeds, third-party devices (like cableCARD TiVos) which could otherwise record a digital signal directly, will be forced to re-digitize an analog signal, with inevitable quality loss in the process. But how to know for sure if a channel is digital or analog as received?'"
Why does everyone assume digital means better? In my experience "fuzziness" with cable is usually cause by horrible wiring (no grounding, split many times, etc.) within a house/apartment, not an inherently bad signal. Cable companies still have a significant portion of their customers using the analog signals because they either don't have digital cable or have more than one TV but don't want to have multiple cable boxes. Thus, the analog signals tend to be relatively clean. The purely digital channels, on the other hand, look to be encoded at such a low bitrate that one can easily see macroblocks continuously.