[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Thing is I have been using Napster lately, to download mp3 music most
> of which has been at 128kbps, and to be honest it is to my ears quite
> acceptable, provided it was recorded properly. Having just downloaded
> and listened to Kate Bush Wutheing Heights, there were definite probs
> with the high freq stuff, sorta muffled artifacts added to them but
> overall, in any listening environment other than my home I doubt they
> would be detectable.
With 90% of the population that doesn't even hear the difference between
an FM broadcast and a CD, I bet that's not a big problem.
> No way is solid-state media gonna replace MD in the forseeable future
> unless some breakthrough happens, and I think that is rather unlikely.
> I mean, they said 10 years back disks as storage would be dead by now,
> too slow, no real improvements on current speed and capacity likely,
> blah blah blah. Just look at hard drives now- 30gig drives for about
> UKP110/US$180 with seek speeds of under 10mS, the heads can find the
> data in under a hundredth of a second- that is one helluva engineering
> feat!
Thanks to our good friends at iNtel, AMD, they find each year a marvoulus
sollution that allows us to run software faster. Thanks to our good friends
at Micro$oft, Corel, Lotus etc, they use that sollution to add more features
to our beloved software. It seems that software tends to follow the same
principles as CPUs. It's complixity doubles each two years..... The reponse to
this demand is bigger harddrives. If the software didn't grow this fast, I bet
we had enough... (remember, 20 years ago, a 20MB (mega-bytes) harddisk was uge!)
> How has solid-state storage progressed? The answer is not very much.
> It slowly comes down in price. Very slowly. Very slowly indeed! The
> cost of HDDs seems to be tumbling now, capacities are rocketing and
> prices tumbling, whereas increased use/demand for solid-state media is
> holding their prices high.
Well, it follows the trend of memory... It doubles in capacity each two years.
>
> All we need is for the next generation of portable MD to have a PC
> interface of some type, and the ability to playback mp3 files and the
> current breed of mp3 players will be as dead as the do-do. Surely the
> MP3 decoder is pretty straightforward and could be included in
> parallel with the ATRAC codec?
Yep... Can't add anything more...
Ralph -> where have I been.....
--
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Ralph Smeets Functional Verification Centre Of Competence - CMG
Voice: (+33) (0)4 76 58 44 46 STMicroelectronics
Fax: (+33) (0)4 76 58 40 11 5, chem de la Dhuy
Mobile: (+33) (0)6 82 66 62 70 38240 MEYLAN
E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] FRANCE
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"For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then
something happened which unleashed the powers of our imagination:
We learned to talk."
-- Stephen Hawking, later used by Pink Floyd --
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