What Happens In Las Vegas
by Paul McGoldrick

When you read this I will be, once more, in Las Vegas for Spring NAB 2007. It is not the show it was when I first went, with a BBC badge on, so many years ago. It is bigger, of course; it is now always in Las Vegas (where else could you get the kW-h needed?); and it shouldn't have the word "broadcasting" in the title anymore.

The not-for-profit lobbyist organizers of this handsomely profitable gathering tried, for a few years, to alter the perception of the conference and exhibits in terms of it all being a multimedia gathering. But that does not work any more, either. Go into any modern television studio's equipment areas and it is all about servers, microprocessors and software. Sure, the signal path starts with an analog pick-up on a camera and ends with an analog display but those digital guys have taken over the rest of the chain.

But, again and again, it seems to me that the designers who put these grand digital boxes together don't understand anything of the television system outside of the narrow products they are peddling.

You don't want to hear me rant about digital designs that fail in the real world. Why we have lip sync issues because the digital guys didn't think (or know?) about delays in their compression and manipulation algorithms; why DSL signals are so horrible to handle because analog engineers weren't involved in the design -- only in the necessary fixes to make the whole thing work properly. But this all re-occurred to me today as I was told about the basics of the development of yet another compression scheme which can, allegedly, run from lossless on down, supposedly using the noise/distortion headroom between ENOB and resolution in data acquisition. I am confused…

Before MPEG-2 even went to committee I remember having a discussion (he probably thought it was an argument) about issues like these with one of the main proponents of what became that standard. Everyone was most impressed by the fact that signals could be compressed at all, although the understanding was not there, in general, about how that actually could happen -- and I was offered some really dozy explanations based on an analog signal restructuring. But the hype carried forward right into committee and the negatives were never aired -- mostly because nobody wanted to hear about potential problems.

The same attitude, plus the need to pacify the computer side of the image industry, persisted in the work of the Advanced Television Standards Committee, with the final table of ATSC standards representing some of the worst compromises possible -- throwing the growth of HDTV into a ten year holding-pattern.

The industry also allowed the implementation of the "HD-Ready" descriptor in retail outlets, in an attempt to sell more equipment, and there is probably a measurable percentage of the US population who believe they are actually watching HDTV when, of course, they are not. And if Hollywood ever implements HDMI requirements there are going to be an awful lot of empty screens…

A few of EN-Genius' sponsors will be at NAB this year; and some who have tried an appearance in previous years have opted to stay at home. I have to say that, on balance, the ones that send bodies -- but not booths -- are probably making the right decision. Their target customers are the design engineers at many of the exhibitors, and they need to collar them on those booths and "dialogue" (as I so frequently hear the noun used these days) with them. When those design engineers mingle with the crowds they will generally cover their badge with a small briefcase, or make sure their badge always rotates to show the backside -- believe me, I have seen my own staffs frequently do it over the years.

I have now taught myself to bite my tongue over the everyday misuse of video and audio terminology as the digital education of video and audio takes, by far, the dominant position; but as I cruise the many floors of NAB, greeting anybody I know from my past lives, I will yearn for the days of yore -- when engineers understood the complete signal chain technology, and the industry they were in.