BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005
The Sound of the Future
By Jerry Pournelle
January 24, 2005
(The Sound of the Future
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Column 294 (Continued from the Previous Week)
The PC as Media Center
I am writing this from the Consumer Electronics Show, where there are thousands of items that assume the PC will become the Media Center for your home. A number of companies, including HP and D-Link, are betting heavily on this particular future.
My own view is a little less enthusiastic. I am not sure why I want to broadcast my digital pictures from my PC to my (lower resolution) living room TV, or why I want PC-controlled music broadcast throughout my house. I don't need any of this, and I have trouble imagining why anyone else would. The teenager with his iPod wouldn't want to listen to the kind of music I like, nor I to his, and while I don't have any teenagers in my house, the typical household in the Media PC displays has several.
I have severe hearing loss in some frequencies, so I am hardly an expert on music quality. My idea of a High Fidelity system is any good amplifier and speaker with enough volume. Enough for me is more than my peers like, but a lot less than the rock enthusiasts want. Going from pretty good at reasonable prices to HiFi at ridiculous prices makes very little change to my listening experience.
Purists will have their own views, and mine aren't relevant to them. For most people, though, it's pretty hard to tell one system playing rock music from another except for sheer volume, particularly in the low frequencies which are felt as much as heard, and that's far more a function of the speakers and amplifier output than of any electronic sophistication. Whether the typical household will want to invest in high quality music systems and Media PC in order to play, in the living room, the kind of music typically collected on computers remains an open question.
The computer as your music source is going to send out 24-bit digital music, which may be better than you can get with a pocket drive, but I can't see the genuine hi-fi enthusiasts going for Media PC music.
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