Direct Tv music channels ans use in audio system

fwiw my HRT MusicStreamer II sounds quite a bit better than DirecTV.

I say this only as a point of reference to those that have one...

Pal,
Your right about compression.
My 'HD' feeds of movies? probably little better than a properly upsampled DVD of the same movie.

EVERYTHING is compressed / stepped on.

The best feeds? News and live sports.

And those are still not 1080. The cameras are, but they down convert to 720. They have been doing this for years for several reasons, and the providers have to add all of those shopping channels to help pay the bills. I would love to have ala carte option. I would gladly pay $150 a month for only 10-12 channels IF they were all 1080.

I am told the last superbowl left the stadium as uncompressed, full bandwidth 1080p. By the time it got well down the pipe, the feed was down to just OK.

I'd pay a premium for better, too. How many people actually WATCH more than maybe a dozen channels?