or cheap? Pick any two!” But increasingly my video and audio purist
friends have been preoccupied with a simpler question: “Do you want
your digital entertainment good or in your pocket? Pick any one!” .
At the “good” end of the spectrum
—your home theater or living
room—displays keep getting better,
DVDs look pretty darned impressive,
and HD (high defi nition) video discs will
come soon. Multichannel audio DVDs
and Super Audio CDs (SACD) sound
spectacular on high-end setups.
But my purist friends point out that
multichannel audio hasn’t caught on, and
they look askance at the world of portable
devices like iPods and cell phones, where
compressed audio and fuzzy video are
the norm. They see a form of Gresham’s
law at work, with bad-quality media driving
out any hope for something better.
As a viewer who goes nuts when the
most fl eeting digital artifact fl oats across
the screen, I feel their pain. It’s downright
weird when people willingly pay
full price for compressed digital files
instead of buying a better-quality CD
with far more playing fl exibility. Even so,
the digital world is moving—in fi ts and
starts—toward higher quality, not lower.
Yes, there are plenty of exceptions.
Again and again, we have historically
been willing to sacrifice quality for
convenience. The big radio of yore
may not have sounded great, but
nobody minded taking an even
tinnier transistor portable along
to a cricket game or a picnic. Prerecorded
cassettes sounded wildly
inferior to gramaphone discs,
but at least the tapes could go along with
you on your morning commute.
Initially CDs were touted for their sound
quality—at a minimum, they abolished
the scratches, pops, and ticks we all got
used to with vinyl—but what sold them
was the combination of that quality with
portability. TV shows played on a VCR
were obviously inferior to broadcasts, but
time-shifting turned out to be a killer app.
Saving money is another reason we’ll compromise
quality. Voice-over-Internet-Protocol
(VoIP) phone calls may not sound
quite as good as those made on dedicated
phone lines, but the price makes the tradeoff
attractive. And when you’re traffi cking
in free stolen tunes or movies copied
illicitly in a theater, you get what you get.
Still, improvement is the trend. Even
though they’re heavily compressed, satellite
digital radio stations sound better than
their analog AM and FM counterparts.
The total pixel count of the video-capable
iPod’s color screen may be minuscule,
but the dots-per-inch count is higher than
what’s on most standard TVs.
And just as digital cameras and inkjet
printers have improved radically over the
years, the same is happening with music.
If you’re willing to give up the space, you
can buy losslessly compressed tunes
from music companies, or rip your CDs
the same way. Improved compression
methods and greater bandwidth
and storage are already bringing
us better video-on-the-go.
So I suspect any quality decline is
temporary. Just as the fi lm industry
wants to sell us high-defi nition
versions of the movies we already
have, the record business will one
day want to take advantage of our
multi-channel home theaters.
When it comes to digital media
quality, it’s Moore’s law, not Gresham’s,
that matters in the long run.
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