>the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears.
The biggest jump in quality was when everything was still analog over the air, but getting ready for the digital transition.
Then digital over the air bumped it up a notch.
You could really see this happen on a big CRT monitor with the "All-in-Wonder" television receiver PCI graphics adapter card.
You plugged in your outdoor antenna or indoor rabbit ears to the back of the PC, then tuned in the channels using software.
These were made by ATI before being acquired by AMD, the TV tuner was in a faraday cage right on the same PCB as the early GPU.
The raw analog signal was upscaled to your adapter's resolution setting before going to the CRT so you had pseudo better resolution than a good TV like a Trinitron. You really could see more details and the CRT was smooth as butter.
As the TV broadcaster's entire equipment chain was replaced, like camera lenses, digital sensors and signal processing they eventually had everything in place and working. You could notice these incremental upgrades until a complete digital chain was established as designed. It was really jaw-dropping. This was well in advance of the deadline for digital deployment, so the signal over-the-air was still coming in analog the same old way.
Eventually the broadcast signal switched to digital and the analog lights went out, plus the All-in-Wonder was not ideal with a cheap converter like analog TV's could get by with.
But it was still better than most digital TVs for a few years, then it took years more before you could see the ball in live sports as well as on a CRT anyway.
Now that's about all you've got for full digital resolution, live broadcasts from your local stations, especially live sports from a strong interference-free station over an antenna. You can switch between the antenna and cable and tell the difference when they're both not overly compressed.
The only thing was, digital engineers "forgot" that TV was based on radio (who knew?) so for the vast majority of "listeners" on the fringe reception areas who could get clear audio but usually not a clear picture if any, too bad for you. You're gonna need a bigger antenna, good enough to have gotten you a clear picture during the analog days. Otherwise your "clean" digital audio may silently appear on the screen as video, "hidden" within the sparse blocks of scattered random digital noise. When anything does appear at all.