Occasionally, I will have cause to have both TVs on upstairs. The one in the bedroom has a digital cable feed while the one in the office has analog (it’s a 13-inch B&W, so I really didn’t see the point in upgrading it).
Funny thing I noticed just the other day, there is an appreciable delay in the digital cable. If I stand in the hallway, I can hear the TV with the analog cable runs somewhere between one and five seconds ahead of the one with the digital.
My first thought is, it’s the decompression time. It gets the compressed digital signal at the same time the analog box gets an uncompressed signal. The time it takes to decompress the signal results in the delay.
Is that reasonably correct? If not, what’s up?
I can’t speak to that, but I’ll add two phenomena I’ve observed.
When I’m watching a broadcast channel on cable in one room, and have the same channel on the other room using an antenna, there’s a clear lag in the cable signal.
When I’m watching a sports event on cable and listening to a broadcast of it on the radio, the radio announcers are clearly describing the action ahead of what I’m seeing on cable. They can’t be THAT good.
I think that phenomenon is due to the transmission time from ground station to satellite back to ground station, but I’m not going to stake my reputation on it. I get that all the time when I watch a Braves game on ESPN. I hate those guys so much, I’ll put up with the static to listen to the game on WSB from Atlanta. Consequently, I almost always hear what happens a few seconds before I see it.