Actually, I think the RF interference problem will be much *worse* as everything turns digital! It's certainly been this way in the US.
In most consumer things, I think you get a better end result as you move toward digital transmission. When you're transmitting in analog, you have to maintain signal strength and clarity as your picture or sound will vary proportionally and perceptibly with the signal quality.
I think everybody is familiar with what's happening with digital stuff - you slice the analog source up into pieces over time, then calculate a number that represents the analog signal over that time slice. Then you send the stream of numbers you generate and reconstruct the original signal on the other end. The critical difference here is that you should be able to reconstruct the signal as long as all the numbers make it through correctly. If you're distance from an antenna gives you a snowy analog picture but is able to get all the digital information over, you'll see a strong and clear signal. In the analog world, getting a clear picture probably means that at any given time you need to be able to sense something like 500 levels of signal, but in the digital world you need only to register whether the data coming over is on or off. In addition to making the detection easier, digital transmission can be encoded so you can reconstruct bits that were lost in transit. So you have a much better chance of being able to get a good signal.
More digital transmissions in the air are often bad news for the analog stuff up there too. If you remember the buzzing sound your modem used to make when you had dial-up service at the start of connections, you've heard what a digital data stream sounds like - a lot of noise. Your analog TV has to deal with rejecting all that to continue to get a clean signal. The digital over-the-air broadcasts are on a different frequency band, so this isn't that hard, but byproducts and side-effects of transmissions in one frequency can affect others.
The ultimate solution for all this is that your bass will probably be digital some day as well. It's easier for digital devices to reject interference from other digital sources. Gibson has secured patents on digital transmission from the guitar with their (largely stillborn) MaGIC system. I feel really bad about this - this was such a natural place for Alembic to be the pathfinder.
Digital definitely has good and bad parts to it. Digital information is easier to store and transport and will generally be better than analog for most people. The bad thing about digital is that you have to make decisions about what is good enough now and live with them in the future. The perfect example of this is CD audio (now 25 years old!). In CD audio, the original sound is sliced into 44,100 pieces per second, and each instance is assigned a value from 0-65,000, representing the strength of the signal at that point. That stream of information (actually two streams, for left and right audio) is pressed into the CD disks. Your CD player reads that information back and reconstructs it and you rock out! CD has been really successful and the sound quality is good enough to the vast majority of listeners. But for really critical listening, sampling at a higher data rate or with more resolution yields better results which is why ProTools systems sample at 192KHz and with higher resolution. Once you've digitized the original source, there's no way for further technology to improve the sound quality without going back to the source. These days, high compression sound files like mp3s lose even more of the original information, but are still generally good enough for most listeners.
Enough ranting! I'm not such a Luddite that I would want to turn back the clock, I'd rather just see that people push the technology more so we don't end up permanently trading off quality for convenience.
David Fung
