![]() ![]() ![]() There’s seemingly only a small space in the middle for high-res portable music players – but they’d have to be fairly bulky to accommodate a large battery to power their preamps, with wired headphones to allow HD playback, and therefore are unlikely to offer the ultra-convenience of truly wireless operations. There is a crossover between these ideals, of course those who buy vinyl also have smartphones. You put your LP on the turntable and let it play. Perhaps higher physical sales are also consumers reacting to the infinite choice that streaming offers, the hyperactivity of shuffle mode. The same goes in many respects for cassettes and even CDs. It’s a physical item, with bespoke artwork, that you can hold in your hand. Buying a vinyl record isn’t just about it sounding different (better, some contend), it connects you more viscerally with the artist. Iconical app Bluetooth#A vocal minority demand lossless audio but most are indifferent.įor those interested in high fidelity and authenticity, using Bluetooth to connect a phone to a speaker might seem like anathema. The iPod Touch had a headphone port (a wired connection is almost always required for uncompressed audio) long after the iPhone dropped it and, although you can still listen to lossless over a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter, the regular Bluetooth connections that almost everyone uses employ some form of compression. The idea of loading gigabytes of WAV files onto a device seems out of date.įor this group, streaming compression is largely satisfactory – listening on earbuds or a smart speaker, as so many do, you don’t notice a drop in quality. You tell Siri to play an artist and it does. This suggests that people broadly fall into one of two camps. Simultaneously, there has been a renaissance in vinyl and cassette sales, and even CDs sales rose in 2021. Some are still around, like those from Fiio, but none have caught on with a mass audience. Various high-resolution hardware players with uncompressed 96KHz playback have come and gone, notably the Pono Player. So what’s the future for the high-res, iPod-like device? How people listen Not only that but streamed music is compressed and likely has lower fidelity than the tracks you might fill your iPod with. If you like the idea of owning the music you play, that’s a serious downside of our streaming age. We have access to enormous libraries – but only for as long as we pay the subscription. In a sense, these days most people rent their music. However, with streaming, that’s not a problem. Smartphones generally have less onboard storage than iPods did. ICloud came online in 2011, and with the advent of the cloud, streaming services started to take off in earnest, from Spotify and its ilk to Apple’s own Apple Music and iTunes Match, which lets users upload their own digitised music collections to the cloud. Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images A paradigm shift Developers even created iPod speaker docks, a surprisingly nifty solution for home listening, if ultimately short-lived as a concept. Many models would come and go, shifting from hard drive to SSD storage but always focused on music on the device. The iPod – much more affordable than the coveted but expensive iMacs that upped the brand’s visibility – would be the product that began Apple’s journey to ubiquity, giving you “1,000 songs in your pocket”. When the first iPod was released in 2001, six years before the first iPhone, Apple was a far smaller company than it is today. Sony’s adherence to WMA files, for example, was out of step with the MP3 explosion of the time. More problematic was their often fiddly interfaces and that they limited you to playing back only select file formats. Their storage capacities were small by modern standards, even if this was normal at the turn of the millennium. ![]() The Creative Zen Player, the Diamond Rio, Sony’s various flash-based models, the MP3 players of the early 2000s were a mixed bag. But that was only good for listening at your desk… Burn.” music from CDs into Apple’s fledgling iTunes. The iMac was already three years old when Steve Jobs encouraged users to “Rip. The iPod was totemic in changing the technological landscape. ![]()
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