Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
There's an article in the current Wired magazine on this. The high end is dying, and the good enough mindset is what is currently selling.
Example. How many of you have abandoned the MP3 format for WAV or FLAC? Space is no longer the issue anymore, as I can buy a 16GB SD chip for $30 US (any quantity) over the counter here in DFW. That's 30 hours of uncompressed Redbook CD audio, per chip. An Ipod classic can now be purchased with 160 GB of storage (that's 300 hours of music, uncompressed). My entire uncompressed music library is only 270 GB currently. But there is no trend of upshifting format of anything, except maybe Blue-Ray, and the jury's still out on that...
|
It's not really true to say that the high end is dying, its simply the fact that the high end will by its very nature always be more of a niche product rather than mainstream, especially if the good enough can get very close to the high end.
Taking your example of music formats, the real change has already happened there with people going from low bitrate mp3s up to stuff in the 256-320k range that offers close enough quality to lossless formats to most people while still saving a fair bit of space, which is still a concern with portable devices even if you think its a non-issue nowadays.