ShowerThoughts

Ughh yeah I mean as a massive fan of digital audio and all of the cool things it can do for how monetarily accessible it is... when digital streams fail because the "buffer" as it is called runs out what you get is the audio equivalent of stop and go traffic. You get a jarring stuttering the progressively gets worse as the processing builds up more and more of a backlog from being behind. It tends to be very ugly and by definition abrupt.

Also something that is very important in digital transmissions is the concept of Clock Synchronization. Digital audio is supremely powerful in the way you can bring together infinite simultaneous streams of audio and mix and match them however you want... but it only works if the clocks in all of the important digital machines are synced. In music recording studios systems such as ADAT or SPIDF are used. I am talking about digital audio/music production here, but the concept applies generally to any digital system that encodes and conveys frequencies and spatiality. For example almost the exact same concept pops up in seismology when conducting high resolution seismic surveys.

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/understanding-digital-clocking-for-audio/

What I am getting at is that in terms of digital corruption, what usually happens is the clocks inside the devices that translated some analog process to a digital waveform didn't keep their clocks properly synced. I think it is way more cool to think about digital distortion this way.

HOWEVER it is important to remember that if you are to examine a digital or audio signal there is no magic difference, in a strange way "digital" is just a perspective on an analog process that approximates some kind of clean binary encoding close enough for a digital instruction to be conveyed. This is one of my favorite videos on the topic ever, it is old but is if anything more relevant than ever in 2025.

https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

A lot of movies do the 'corrupted digital stream' with boxy digital artifacts. They use it even for things that don't have a digital stream, like cameras, which is silly but it works as a shorthand.

It is funny when they do use static for digital media though.

I guess an MP4 file that won't open because it's corrupted or a spinning circle on a streaming service just isn't as theatrical.

Cloverfield was my breaking point. Overwriting digital files doesn't work that way.

You will get a freeze frame only if the demuxer and/or decoder was written by competent people and detects errors properly. In many cases the playback will attempt to continue with artifacts (though they still look very differently from analog static).

Reading The Expanse at the moment and there is an analogue (no pun intended) of this: communication through the Gates is affected by some kind of weird interference, which is audible as strange whistling/ringing in audio. But surely they're using digital, encrypted signals for these connections (rather than broadcasts)! It should result in a degraded bandwidth or corruption, not whatever that is.

Though now I think about it, DAB radio does get a kind of watery noise when there's poor signal, so maybe it's not completely unrealistic. If anyone knows enough about DAB to explain that, I'm interested.