Studios pause as audiophiles embrace digital

Studios pause as audiophiles embrace digital
The next big format for music may be just plain bits. Many audiophiles who have amassed collections of vinyl records, cassette tapes and compact disks see digital as the ultimate format-though it's not clear where users will house liner notes and album cover art.

But those are secondary considerations as music hovers on the brink of the digital age. The biggest hurdle by far is creating a copyright protection technology that gives studios enough confidence to release their wealth of content. So we asked top technologists on either side of the question to give us their views on the way forward.

Albhy Galutin of Universal Studios' music group (Santa Monica, Calif.) lays out his requirements for next-generation players. Andy Wolfe of Sonic-Blue Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) makes the case from an OEM's viewpoint that all the ingredients are embodied in today's products and it's time for studios to ante up. Expect both sides to continue to struggle with the issues for some time in the courtrooms as well as on the design benches.

Below this great debate, a host of other design issues awaits developers of Internet audio products. In exclusive contributions in this issue and online (www.eet.com), startup Mesh Networks Inc. (Orlando, Fla.) and industry veteran Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas) discuss separate ideas for networking portable players. Cirrus Logic (Austin, Texas) lays out what it believes will be the successful product types, and an analyst from Berkeley Design Technology Inc. (Berkeley, Calif.) gives tips for walking through the minefield of testing these devices.

We round out this package with a discussion of the nuances of some of the latest audio codecs and, more broadly, in digital audio signaling.

Despite the copyright battle and other issues, Internet audio remains a market with some momentum. Market watcher Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.) estimates 7 million portable MP3 players shipped in 2001 and nearly twice as many will go out the door this year from a growing array of OEMs.

Factor into that mix an expanding product set of wired and wireless, portable and rack systems-indeed, even cell phones, PDAs and CD/DVD players are building in MP3 decode capabilities. So in the future, "Internet audio" may not indicate a specific kind of system so much as a capability many consumer gadgets share, putting us all in contact with our favorite tunes.

Now, where are we going to put those liner notes?