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Amherst Bytes #1: The Portable Digital Audio Revolution (Part 1)

Below you will find the first article of my tech column for the Amherst Student. I’m posting it here, as I will for all future issues, for all those who don’t get a chance to read the Student.

I forget exactly where the idea for “Amherst Bytes” came about, it may have been during an Unreal Tournament 2004 match, maybe during a bout of Soul Calibur 2, or it may simply be the result of a longing for a tech-voice in the Student. Ultimately, I hope that this column can serve to enlighten readers about technology and all it has to offer. Technology is now a central part of our lives; it pervades our communication, education, and entertainment. It is important for us to understand it, as it will only become exponentially more integral to the way we function.

I will inaugurate “Amherst Bytes” with a discussion of one of the most important trends of our time, that of digital audio players (DAPs for short). One need only look at the amount of people on campus strutting white earbuds to realize how far the digital audio movement has come. When technology moves significantly beyond the early adopters and into the mainstream, we need to really sit up and take notice.

To fully understand the impact of the DAP revolution; we must start from the beginning. The Diamond Rio PMP300 was the first DAP to prove successful. Released in September of ‘98, the Rio allowed users to carry around their mp3s (and the now extinct mp2 format) in a device smaller than a portable cassette player, and without the skipping worries of portable CD player. This would later prove to be one of the main draws of DAPs. Though it only held 32MB of storage, it was expandable—but that would have only added to the $200 retail price. The RIAA, that bastion of artist’s rights, sued Diamond because they believed the player encouraged piracy (which would have been an easy solution to much of their worries today). They lost, of course, and DAPs were ruled legal, opening the door for competition.

Following the release of the Rio, many other companies jumped into the DAP market in 1999. As competing players were released, prices dropped, and storage sizes increased due to advances in storage media. DAPs took on several forms, first are the flash-based players (such as the Rio) that don’t have much storage space but make up for that deficiency in unskippable playback and tiny sizes. These players lack moving parts (there is no hard drive spinning inside of them), this makes them impossible to skip and also perfect for heavy activity. Today, they can hold around 1GB of music, compared to the 32MB of the original Rio.

There are also mp3 CD players, which for most (including myself) were the only affordable DAP option a few years ago. These playback mp3s recorded onto CD-R’s (allowing up to 700MB of storage per disc), but they still suffer from the same problems that plague normal portable CD players. They are bulky and tend to skip; as no amount of skip protection can compete with the flash-based players. I won’t be talking too much about these players. Today they have been overshadowed by flash and hard-drive DAP’s, and there simply are no outstanding mp3 CD players.

The final (and perhaps most significant) type of DAP is the hard-drive based one. These started out as massive players, often called “personal jukeboxes”, which used laptop hard drives instead of flash memory. The release of the iPod in 2002 brought these players (and DAP’s in general) to the mainstream public. The iPod not only brought about general acceptance, but also cemented a new aesthetic and usability standard for all future DAPs. These hard drive players eventually started using “microdrives”, which are tiny hard drives that allow for even greater portability. The iPod Mini uses a microdrive for this very reason. Paradoxically, these microdrive players are hot items right now, even though they often cost about the same as a slightly larger laptop-drive player.

I will continue discussing these digital audio players in my next column; it seems I’ve severely underestimated the extent to which I could discuss this trend.


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