What does the future hold?

Squeezebox. Media PC. iPod. Wireless. Downloadable music.

These things are all now. They're rapidly changing the face of home entertainment and music distribution, and inexorably with it, hifi.

But where will it end? What is the convergent device that will bring it all together?

1) The media/HTPC. Things like shuttles, mini-mac, etc. Plug in by DVI to your LCD or plasma screen, digital output to your AVR or DAC and wireless music serving to the rest of the hom?

2) The squeezebox. Will it be the control centre, streaming music and video off your pc in another room?

3) The console. A dark horse this, but with the recent annoucements regarding PS3's Cell processor, and the continual development of game consoles, will this be it? Adding music server, internet browsing and similar capabilities is not a difficult task. X-box2 and PS3 might be it.

And what of content distribution? Blu-ray and HD-DVD are all very well, but are the days of physical media coming to an end? Online music and video distribution will get bigger and bigger.

Will it combine with on-demand cable and satellite services?

Will we end up with no physical data storage of our own, but rather have internet space for our own files and purchase access rights to music and video which are stored centrally (like on-demand)?

And can you pay extra to have your stuff stored on a server on 11 phases of mana?

 

Where will it end? Where do it you want it to end, Convenience will come into it so I would suggest a central server which you can access from any part of your living space (not bound by your house). Probably the same server that'll allow you to mange communication, cooking, temperature control, the whole caboodle. We live in a "I want it now" society so unless it all goes up in smoke and we have to revert to actually playing instruments I reckon our music will end up on servers.

 

As long as it includes plenty of hard disc storage I will be a happy bunny

 

Think of the bouns Craig ;-), I feel Isaac's coming up with a multi-format all in ome box unit soon Or could it be the new emission laws are only going to allox 'x' number of boxes due to Globel warming Oh err' naim guys watch out

 

No HDDs, It'll all be solid state storage

 

No, I'm not working on anything... it just strikes me that with the home-theatre-in-a-box gaining the popularity it is, and flat-screen TVs allowing the british living room to be reclaimed, things will move that way. As Tom says, we want it now, and it will evolve to distributed storage (rather than any storage mechanism in your own home).

 

i must be in some kind of time-warp, then.
i've just discovered vinyl !
i like gatefolds best. very tactile.

 

I dunno - I guess from the average users point of view, if we get beyond the point of physical media, they aren't going to give two hoots where the music is stored, though they might if its starts costing them loadsa dosh when the record insdustry starts trying to go to a pay per listen model. They'll have to do something about software stability, startup times and ease of use though if they expect computer based audio to be the centre of everyones listening experience. As its stands. I can be listening to music within ten seconds of deciding that I want to and don't expect my turntable to be catching a virus anytime soon.

 

Photography did not kill painting did it? Artists feared for their livelyhoods and existence but it never happened. My guess is that some new music carriers will emerge over the next decade or two. Those of us who have LPs, CDs, cassette tapes [????] or whatever can continue using those if we so wish. The future hardware is not the problem, it is the 'music industry' itself that is the problem. When the future stars are chosen by tele-voting a la Your a Star type TV programmes, it is time to start hoarding whatever music that you can find in whatever format it happens to be on. Such music was played by real musicians playing real instruments. The immediate future does not look very rosy from a music perspective, perhaps that will change in time. I wonder.....

 

In the future, music will be beamed directly into your brain from, ummm, music-beaming-brainwave aerials. Also, we will eat 'moon biscuits'.

 

notaclue - I think you might have had a few too many moon biscuits...

 

thats exactly what I was thinking reading this thread.

The future's what we make it, and mine will be valves, vinyl (at about a quid per LP!), and great big speakers.

I think mine sounds more fun, but I would - I picked it!


When we think of the future I think its in our nature to presume it will be high-tech.

If you asked someone in 1970 what the world will be like in 2005 - they would say that we will be living in big white pods and riding hover-bikes!!

In the future aunty mavis will still play her cassettes, still drive a Lada and still have flock wall paper on the wall... and would you want it to be any different?

 

It will be both - solid state on the low end cos its cheap and HDD on the high end where the application needs the storage space.

Its all down to Gb per $.

If the storage is in 'internet land' that would be even better (enterprise storage is $$$).

Anyone remember this same discussion several years ago on HFC? At that time ppl were saying HDD - no way.

Things are moving in the right direction

 

imho the digital jukebox is the future however it would be nice to get a 96/24 and 192/24 capable version of a squeezebox able to output those sample frequencies to a dac for decoding - hey we're talking blue sky here but flac can deal with these sample rates already iirc. other than that i believe that floating point rather than integer pcm is another step in the right direction. the real problem though is the software. hopefully blu ray will give a 'sellable' carrier that can be hacked nicely so we can all store 1ghz 64 bit floating point samples on our googolplexabyte hard drives (or solid state storage) within the next 10 years.
another cool thing that i can see happening is that you'll have everything you hear and see recorded or processed on a personal recorder so if you are in the car or a club and like a piece of music it can be recognised by software and ordered from amazon and placed on your home hard drive for when you get home. you'd also be able to dump your day at the zoo or notes from your lectures for editing or revision at a later date.
i can also see pay to download broadband links to live concerts at different bitrates for different prices - download the mp3 version for £5 the flac for £7 and the 24/192 flac for £10 etc. in fact we're already seeing something similar to this with the prodigy's and chemical brothers remix albums - not quite there yet but a step in the right direction imho. glastonbury and reading would be great for this....
cheers


julian

 

In all honesty people, who really gives a sh*t? The future of music reproduction has little, if anything, to do with quality. Until it does (and that won't be happening anytime soon) I'm perfectly happy with my out-dated technology, thanks all the same.

 

The next big step will come in the perfomance of amplifiers. Watch this space

Chris

 

Maybe with the new environmental law that is coming in the summer, manufacturers will be looking to advance technology quickly so they can charge a premium. Disposing of all that equipment will cost a lot off money, just thought it may be cheaper for them to send items back to China where they will just dump it anywhere ‘problem solved’!

As far as music goes I haven’t paid full price for years. I never get taken in by the advertising circuit where the musicians just happens to appear on chat shows, go to film premiers and turn out at the latest charity concert so they can play there new song. Seems that I have forgot to mention the outrageous stunt or the verbal attack on someone else and all this just for a cover version of another artist’s song, which in the vast majority of the time the original being superior.

 

I have to agree Gazz, there is a wider choice of music at a [relatively] lower price, than ever before. Generally, people just don't want to find out for themselves [or remember what they already know].

 

Not convinced by the convergence arguments or by the net-centric view of the world.

Convergence is the dream of the Microsofts et al - well, when the world is reaching saturation point with undocumented-and-never-used-features in PC land, where does a man turn to make his next bilion or three? Given that most hi-fi enthusiasts have never embraced the 5.1 or 7.1 multi-channel AV world, it's highly unlikely they will fall over each other to link hi-fi to TV to PC to intelligent fridge... and, god forbid, wireless links instead of shiny cables! There will be a decent market in the middle where people have a joined-up living room - with combo DVD/CD player etc. And loads of folk will continue to have a (dis)array of devices to separately do film-and-telly, and music, and games, and PC stuff... and who won't be up for an integrated home where when you upgrade your PC operating system your TV gets a start-up error and you can't play CDs. Changeover to digital TV will be enough complexity and turbulence for many.

Net-centric stuff: is this for real? Yeah, downloads, Windows Media Center, nice in theory etc, but I can't imagine most folk going for
(a) pay-per-play stuff vs. a tangible shiny buy-once-use-many disc (small/silver or big/black) on the shelf,
(b) reliance on all "your" music and preferences stored on a who-cares-where server which cuts you off from all entertainment if your broadband link goes down, or
(c) the massive (financial and environmental) cost of replacing every bit of existing kit with something that talks to something else (minimally, to the PC or router which links to the net) which it didn't previously need to know existed.

Enough to make me want to run away to a cave with a wind-up gramophone... for the simple life.

Just a thought.

Nigel

 

...no, I'm Craig!