Question regarding visual quality. We and my wife's parents have Xfinity. They have a low-end Samsung, and we got the mid-grade Sony (Sony has 3 classes - the high-end one was too pricey 2 years ago). Anyway, our pictures are night and day different. Theirs is much more crisp and fluid....ours on the Sony is not. Fuzzy edges, etc.
Can cable tv signals be degraded depending where you are on the line (for instance, we might be at the end of the cable line from the hub box, or whatever its called).
Any action I can take to remedy this?
Digital signals can be degraded, but it can also be deliberately reduced in quality depending upon where you live. For example, you might be getting a much lower bandwidth signal than they are getting.
We have the same problem here in Pasadena. I have an LG 65C7P .. the image quality from Charter was absolute garbage - virtually
unwatchable. This was across a mid-level TV in the bedroom and my top-tier TV in my living room.
However, my friends in SD have a lower-end LG, non-OLED, and their picture was much better than mine. When checking the signal quality (dBmV and SNR), I noticed their line had slightly better quality but that wasn't really the issue. The issue was that there were fewer CPE nodes on the CMTS (don't ask how I know, lol).
So the issue was that Charter (TWC Spectrum actually) was overprovisioning their network in Pasadena much more so than they were in this part of San Diego.
If you have a QAM tuner, you can actually diagnose these signals directly by measuring the variable bitrate of the signal.
Now, all this being said, Xfinity is either fiber or DSL; so they won't have the same kind of issues you'll get with cable given the individual lines are not shared the same way cable lines are.
In fact, the issue you're having was so stark and so bad for me and the fact that nothing that I could do locally could really change the issue; all of this led up to me finally cutting the cord.
I simply could not justify paying money for a product that I knew I couldn't enjoy; and when comparing it to Vue and YouTube TV, that had vastly better picture quality, there was really nothing holding me back. Get fast internet, and a collection of streaming services.
Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and Vue + 400 Mbps. That's where I'm at right now, and I don't even watch TV all like that, lol.