Thanks for the memory
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday November 23, 2009
Increases in digital storage mean music compression is a thing of the past. Moore's Law has finally held up long enough to mean something for music lovers. It could very well signal the start of the end for the compact disc. Loosely, Moore's Law states the amount of electronic memory that can be crammed into a defined space doubles every two years and it has been holding roughly true since the dawn of computing. Maybe Moore should have said something about the prices plummeting too; I remember seeing my first 1GB memory card not so many years ago and it cost $2000.When MP3 burst into the public consciousness a decade ago, computer memories and internet speeds were such that music had to be tightly compressed to be computer-viable. But lately, as hard drives have started to be measured in terabytes and internet speeds are fast enough that people routinely download entire movies, it has become possible to store music electronically without compression.This means the sound quality of the original CD along with all the convenience of the MP3 format.Take, for example, the Sooloos. This is a media server that can store up to 6000 CDs with no compression whatsoever. Meridian Audio saw the possibilities and bought the company that developed Sooloos and, in a clear reference to the evils of compression, its chairman, Bob Stuart, said: "The days of listening to 10 per cent of your music collection are gone."Sooloos is based around a 43 centimetre LCD touch screen that displays album covers, playlists and profiles and makes it possible to access your music by artist, title, track or genre. It can even recognise when the artist you've selected is playing back-up.It can also pick music by itself to suit a particular mood and keep on selecting music along those lines all night.It can be networked to up to 32 different locations, each playing its own music at its own volume. And it automatically generates an MP3 version of all the music it plays to make loading a portable digital music player quick and easy.Here's the best bit. It's intuitive and easy to use; so easy it's actually fun. Here's the worst bit. It's $20,000. But remember that 1GB memory card for $2000? Now they're cheap enough to give to friends when sharing photographs. Wearing the Meridian brand, the Sooloos is unlikely to drop much in price but you can bet there will be a host of affordable products along similar lines in the near future at far more user-friendly prices.Does this mean the death of CD? Retailer Len Wallis recently wrote in his blog that as much as he loves CDs, he has no doubt the future of recorded music will be online."The stumbling block of performance is now being resolved," he wrote. "Better broadband speeds and offerings make access more available. Convenience is the key and once we have the combination of convenience and performance, we will have ready access to a previously unimagined quantity and quality of music."Even so, CDs will be around for many, many years because such universally popular technology takes a long time to die, no matter how outdated it may get. For example, on the website of Pioneer Electronics you'll discover a dual-well, auto-reverse cassette deck. "We sell about 10 a month," spokesman Michael Broadhurst says. "While technology cycles are getting faster some consumers who have invested in cassette and VHS tapes are in no hurry to part ways with their collection."
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald