Digital can be maddening because it alternates between crystal-clear and OFF, which ultimately I think is worse. Some streaming services will also decide to auto-next-song after the slightest glitch which is annoying too.
I wonder if there are audio codecs that work similarly to wavelet based video codecs (DWT instead of DCT) where you could have stepwise degradation.
1. Sort your bits by importance. 2. Encode them as a real number using arithmetic coding. 3. Transmit that real number in an analogue way.
That means the more noise you have in your signal the fewer bits you receive correctly.
There are probably much more clever ways to do it than that but I don't think much work has really been done on it unfortunately because it's quite complex.
Why the digital FM standard doesn't do that, I'm at a loss.
There are definitely progressive codecs. Hell, look at JPEG (which uses Wavelets). Older kids will remember waiting for JPEG's of naked ladies to get "clearer and clearer" as the interlaced mode progressively builds the picture.
p.s. Wavelets are a super fun Google/Wiki to read up on over a night.
[edit] IT SHOULD BE NOTED, not all countries may have adapted the same codec so this "popping out" issue may only affect certain countries.
Why the digital FM standard doesn't do that, I'm at a loss.
The form of progressiveness in JPEG and other file formats is conceptually quite simple --- you send the "rough draft" first, then incrementally improve quality by sending more bytes. "Degradation" is basically limited to truncating the stream.
Broadcast radio reception degrades in a very different way --- (unpredictable) parts of the signal vary in strength or actually become corrupted. Either the decoder can decode the bits correctly or it can't, and which parts get weakened or corrupted is not easily predictable.
You mean between 1 and 0?
I think it is worth mentioning that this is called fault tolerance, aka graceful degradation.