Monday, September 30, 2013

The Hills Are Alive...

Music technology has always presented a choice—quality versus convenience.  For example, you can either have a high quality sound system with your favorite music on vinyl or thousands of songs on an iPod with ear buds. I believe this choice will slowly disappear as technology continues to advance. Memory is progressively becoming cheaper and smaller and music could utilize more of this available space for higher quality files.  With Google Fiber spreading its infrastructure and other companies trying to keep up, Internet speeds keep increasing. Not only does this allow faster downloads for higher quality music files, but it also opens doors for higher quality music streaming. Technology keeps moving forward, and music hardware will not be left behind. Portable speakers and headphones will only get better; there isn't much room to keep getting smaller. As music technology improves, the choice between quality and convenience vanishes, leaving the combination of both as the only viable choice for music.  

4 comments:

  1. http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/tech/innovation/death-stereo-system/index.html?hpt=te_t1

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  2. I've heard a fair amount about this. Having never listened to a vinyl record before, I really should check it out and compare the quality. It's never really occurred to me to have better quality audio.

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  3. Is memory the only barrier to high quality sound? It seems like the hardware might also need to be improved, like with earbuds, and then the dilemma between quality and convenience would remain.

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    1. I didn't say memory was the only barrier, in fact I said that I believe that headphones and small speakers will also continue to improve along with memory. Why wouldn't music hardware continue to improve?

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