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Singing the digital blues -- very clearly
© St. Petersburg Times Iguess getting old is when you realize that just about one more "wave of the future" will swamp your dugout canoe. Here I am, barely computer semiliterate and still marveling over color television, push-button phones and microwave popcorn, and along comes the digital age. When I started hearing about digital stuff, I thought the reference was to fingers, as in digital stimulation and the well-known third-digit communication that is a favorite of Florida drivers. Some of my techie friends tried to explain digital technology to me, all giving up and muttering under their breath when I asked them how the little ones and zeros become music. They told me to call my cable service. Obviously they either have different cable services or they really do have 45 minutes to wait on hold before being told, "It isn't our fault." A few years back I had the great opportunity to take part in a digitized recording of folk music, a genre usually presented around campfires by and to those who have consumed various amounts of beer. I was surprised to enter a studio that looked like the set of a Star Trek movie. There I listened to long arguments about the difference between hisses and pops and the best way, using the graphic display on a computer screen, to eliminate one or the other. Then my television cable company went digital, which means there are now more kinds of malfunction. Instead of going completely dead or getting hazy so that it looks like an old UHF broadcast right after the tinfoil ball falls off the rabbit ears, the picture can break up into those little pixel things that look like Salvador Dali's painting of Abraham Lincoln. So it is with some trepidation that I consider the advent of digital radio, which some stations already broadcast, although receivers won't be available to the public for a few years. Hmmm. "We're making it better, trust us," sounds remarkably like U.S. foreign policy. Digital technology, I am told, is supposed to remove all of the static, incoherent noise and other acoustical garbage from broadcasts. Last time I checked, however, Bill O'Reilly, Fear Factor and Connie Chung were still coming through, so it apparently has limitations. On radio, digital technology is supposed to clean up signals and vastly improve the sound of AM stations while making some less dramatic improvements in FM broadcasts. Oh, boy, improved AM. I can't tell you how often I have wished that someone would improve the sound quality on the weird melange of moronic right-wing shock jocks, rap music, limited playlist oldies and raving evangelicals that AM radio presents. And we certainly want to make sure that brain-dead 20-somethings with their hats on backwards are able to appreciate every nuance of that all-bass stuff -- you know, the ear bleed stuff that serves no purpose other than to irritate those with normal hearing and intelligence. There might be some slight value in cleaning up the sound for political spots, which we do need presented more clearly. I'm pretty sure that a proper digitized rendering of Jeb Bush 's now-famous quote about how best to undermine a proposed amendment to the Constitution would show that the governor was referring to "devious clams,"not "devious plans," and we could all go to bed at night wondering how our state's chief executive managed to subvert shellfish rather than worrying about whether he was trying to thwart the will of the voters. By the same token, I'm pretty sure what his father said was, "Read my lips. No nude taxis." There is one overwhelming advantage. As with many my age, a long history of too many explosions and too much Grateful Dead on the Walkman has given me progressive hearing loss that in other circumstances would alarm me. However, the more I hear, the less I want to hear, and I am increasingly comfortable with any condition that blocks a postmodern world's efforts to make me hear more.
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