> Touching on something Alan said about the no moving parts recorder:
> having sold our souls for digital technology, we still cheat ourselves
using
> primitive electromechnical forms of playback/recording. As the density of
> solid state microelectronics becomes higher, while the price drops through
> the floor, we should see within the next decade recordings-on-a-chip.
> Imagine having today's CD-quality or better in a player on your wristwatch!
Caveat: While I have worked for a couple different companies who develop
digital audio technology, and design and manufacture sophisticated, very
expensive, professional digital audio equipment, I am a business/operations
person, not a technical/engineering person. Two comments, then:
1. For the normal human being to hear an audio signal that has been converted
from digital to analog, electromechanical loudspeakers of some sort are still
required. (The companies I worked for always had a significant investment in
extremely high quality loudspeakers and headsets.) Can such things be truly
micro-miniaturized, retain a significant level of playback quality and still
obey the laws of physics? Seems to me, a high-quality player in a wristwatch
would only be a step above a Walkman -- you'd still need to use those silly
stick'em-in-your-ear-phones.
2. High quality "recordings on a chip" (as opposed to singing greeting cards)
are already possible -- I've seen/heard them. However (given my limited
technical understanding), seems to me, it's one thing to manipulate digital
audio through a "single chip," it's quite another to store audio files of any
significant size (say, the equivalent of an entire CD) on a "single chip" --
you'd need a micro-miniaturized storage medium too. It seems more likely that
we will see miniaturized receivers of somesort -- that can receive and decode
digital audio signals transmitted from, say, a satellite (there's a company
developing a system like this right now). You'd still need those earphones
though.
-mary