Comment by toast0

> digital TV never worked as well as analog. in my opinion, the switch should have never been justified until it could be qualitatively proven that digital > analog. by "greater than" / better I mean not interrupting the viewing experience, especially the audio.

I'm not sure I agree with you. Audiowise, you may be right, but video wise, it took a lot to have near perfect video receiving, without ghosts and other weirdness, whereas if you've got a comfortable margin from the digital cliff, you can get an uninterrupted picture and audio, and it will be as good as it gets.

Now, when someone at the station decides they should stuff 8 subchannels of 1080i over the 20Mbps carrier with static multiplexing, that's going to look awful. Dynamic multiplexing helps, but doesn't work miracles either. If the broadcaster does 1 HD stream with about 12-15Mbps, it can look pretty good, as long as it's not flowing water or Olympic diving, one or two, maaaaybe three SD subchannels for the rest of the bandwidth is ok too.

If you don't have a comfortable margin, it is much worse though. Analog TV audio was usually pretty decent even with a very snowy picture. And then there's the delays in tuning to a new channel.