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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The Xbox Series X will be missing the optical S/PDIF audio output that was present on the Xbox One and Xbox 360 hardware lines.
[...] The removal will mainly impact players who use a small subset of high-end gaming headsets and audio systems that rely on the optical audio connection instead of audio sent over HDMI or Microsoft's wireless standard. Some users will be able to use S/PDIF passthrough output from their TV-set as a replacement, though. And Windows Central reports that wireless headset makers like Astro are already working on solutions to make existing Xbox One-compatible S/PDIF products work on the Series X.
Microsoft has also confirmed that the Series X will be missing the IR extension port that was present on the back of the Xbox One and the IR blaster that was present on the Xbox One S. Those features were only really useful in extremely limited circumstances, such as for Xbox users who wanted to use the system's TV remote control functions without plugging in a Kinect sensor.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Friday March 20 2020, @05:22PM (1 child)
Your statement of digital signal degrading ungracefully is a bit unfair. If you say an analog signal inherently degrades gracefully I will give you that. On the other hand no signal is nowadays passed without any form of modulation and these in turn degrade gracefully, or where the datastream, is not encoded with some form of FEC or BEC system.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 20 2020, @06:17PM
I'm not sure I understand your argument. Obviously modulation is required - that's the only way you can send a signal wirelessly - analog signals are all modulated as well AM radio = Amplitude Modulated, FM = Frequency Modulated. Even modem = MODulator/DEModulator. Nothing special about modulation. Even smoke signals rely on modulation for signal transmission.
Digital signals do often include error correction as well, and that does help raise the bar some, but 50% data loss (or even 20%) is still likely to mean nothing useful gets through, especially if any form of compression is involved, while 50% loss on an analog signal the snow will be getting pretty annoying, but probably not interfere with comprehension since the human brain is an absolutely astounding signal processor. In practice, that mostly means that an analog signal will be useful much further beyond its "design range" than a digital one.
Really though, my point was just that digital signals aren't completely immune to interference, they just raise the floor - minor interference may as well not exist. But as the signal-to-noise ratio falls, analog signals degrade like going down a hill, while digital signals remain pristine until they suddenly fall off a cliff.