A Conversion Conversation

Tuesday, February 17, is D-Day: Digital Day. Ready or not.

This coming Tuesday is doomsday.

It is the day we’ve all been warned about again and again over the last couple of years.

It’s doomsday for analog television. From that day forward, TV programs will be broadcast only digitally.

For those of us who are young and have grown up in a digital age, that event may not seem all that significant, but those of us who are older may grasp that there’s a sea change taking place. Since the very beginning of radio and TV and the first magnetic recordings, audio and video transmission has been analog. So this Tuesday, broadcasting as we have known it since the beginning is going away.

There’s a good chance, however, that most of us won’t care. They tell us that if we have one of the newer TVs or if our old TV is connected to cable, we will continue to receive programming just fine, only now in the form of digital broadcasts alone. And even if we are still grabbing our signal out of the ether with rabbit ears, we can make...