One of the things that I miss about analog electronics is how the signal degrades nicely. For example, with FM, if I drive under a bridge the radio gets a little fuzzy or switches to mono. With newer digital satellite radio, the playback just stops.
Evan back with old analog TV broadcasts, if there was a signal issue, the picture would just get fuzzy. Now with HDTV, the picture goes away completely.
I know a lot of this has to do with analog formats being highly inefficient and thus having lots of redundancy.
I distinctly remember that one of the marketing features of DVB-T was "perfect picture or none at all" while I haven't seen any consumer grade DVB-T receiver that actually behaves that way and instead marginal signal results in various ugly MPEG artifacts.
I've not used DVB-T, but ATSC (which on Linux uses the DVB-T subsystem); the range of conditions where you can get perfect picture is much larger than from analog broadcast TV, but the experience with marginal signals is indeed much less watchable. If you've got nothing else to watch, you can watch an analog broadcast that's more snow than picture, as long as you're getting the sync signals well enough.
Evan back with old analog TV broadcasts, if there was a signal issue, the picture would just get fuzzy. Now with HDTV, the picture goes away completely.
I know a lot of this has to do with analog formats being highly inefficient and thus having lots of redundancy.