5" MP3 CD players suggest their own immediate obsolescence.
I need to test MDLP2 to better characterize degrees of lossy compression and
compare ATRAC to MP3 artifacts. It was interesting to see my girlfriend
uncritically accept the marketing claims of cramming a bunch of albums onto a
single MD. For her first MP3-mix MD, she wanted to use MDLP4 to store our 192
Kbps MP3s. I had already tested this to confirm that it sounds truly horrible
by any standards, so I dissuaded her.
MP3 (5") CD players will establish to us that what people really want in a
portable player is *not* quantity, but portability. The U.S. companies are
foolish and cannot understand smallness as a design goal, unlike Japan. But
there are several trends suggesting how quickly 5" MP3 CD portables will
suggest their own obsolescence:
o CDR 1/2-thickness cases are suddenly trendy and available everywhere.
o Circular 24-CD soft carrying cases are becoming available. Too often,
though, such cases are still geared toward the anti-portable attitude of "more
is better". (I'm looking for 10-disk circular holders that *strive* to be
compact -- Case Logic tries to make their cases as jumbo, oversized,
high-capacity, and bulky as possible.
o Thin circular clamshell single-CD cases are becoming widely available.
o Big, unportable "CD player and CD case" carrying cases aren't seen in use
widely.
o Sony's CD players are now circular and thin, indicating that the 5" CD
itself is limiting portability and becoming the bottleneck.
These trends suggest people are awakening to the way the 5" CD itself is
inherently restrictive of portability. I have an MP3 CD player and thoroughly
learned that portability is *far* more important than quantity of music.
Nothing is more useless in many mobile situations than the ability to cram 7
albums into the form of a single 5" CD.
If I wanted 7 albums, I'd simply put 7 raw 5" CDs into my hypothetical 10-CD
compact round carrying case and store it in my backpack. So the space
occupied by quantity of music is not presently an issue at all, with CD
portable players. The real problem though is the diameter of the media, which
renders the player itself vastly too bulky, even with Sony's thin round
players.
The thought "I wish I could fit more albums into a single 5" disk" rarely
occurs, compared to the universal thought "I wish my player was way smaller
and thus truly portable."
Thus the 5" MP3 CD player only achieves 1 thing: it suggests that what we
*really* want and need is not a zillion albums on one 5" CD, but rather, a
player that has MP3 ability but is designed around smaller storage media.
The 5" MP3 CD player will be very quickly eclipsed by the variant which it
inadvertantly suggests: a 3" MP3 CD player, which has the ability to store 2
40-minute hi-fi 256 Kbps MP3 albums. 80 minutes of music per 3" CDR is
*plenty* density. Cramming more on is not a goal at all, compared to making
the player more portable -- that is, smaller.
-- Michael Hoffman
http://www.amptone.com/audio
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