"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Serge Auckland" wrote
in message
"Don Pearce" wrote in message
...

Now this is interesting on the Beeb news web site. A
bunch of graphs showing gadget ownership. Phones, CD
players and video recorders have all peaked, and are on
their way down. DVDs and mobiles are just about
plateau-ing. Internet related stuff is still climbing.
For how long, I wonder? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12058944

Some of the charts reflect trends in Europe and the UK, but not in the
USA. Central heating and washing machines have been at the 90%+ level
since or before the 1950s in the US. Even people living at or below the
poverty level had them. I surprised by the difference when I lived in
Germany in the 1960s.

Any survey of this sort depends rather on what the
question is, and how it's answered. For example, the
decline in telephone availability is pointless.If almost
everyone has access to a mobile 'phone, then the need for
a fixed telephone, which is I presume what the question
asked, goes away. Ditto with the question of a video
recorder: If they mean tape based, then of course it is
in decline, but if they include hard-disc based PVRs,
then I suggest that the availability of video recording
will possibly be greater now than before.

DVRs are very common in cable boxes that are used in the US. I believe
that some US cable-TV networks don't even offer cable interfaces that lack
DVR features.

What's sad for me is the decline in CD players, because
these will not have been replaced with networked audio
players of the Sooloos or Squeezebox kind, but have been
largely replaced by portable players, of the iPod kind,
or on-line players of the Spotify kind, both playing
heavily data-compressed audio. Nevertheless, both at
least (especially Spotify) encourage listening to a wider
genre of music, so are helping to widen musical
appreciation, which has to be for the good.

The presumption that portable players are necessarily playing
lossy-compressed files is false. At least three lossless compression
formats are in wide use, and many players (even my tiny Sansa Clip)
support plain old .wav files. There is considerable evidence that
lossless-compressed audio files play with identical fidelity as
uncompressed files.

I would bet money that the VAST majority of iPods, Sansa Clips etc are
playing at whatever is the default bit rate for the device concerned. The
people I regularly come into contact with have generally no idea what
"bit-rate" means, or the difference between MP3, MP2, AAC, lossless data
reduction or WAV. As far as most people are concerned, they use the device
as it comes out of the box and NEVER reconfigure any of the settings.

Yes, those of us here and on similar fora may find this hard to believe, but
in my discussions with many music-literate people at our local radio
station, only a couple out of the staff of around 50 had any idea what I was
talking about. None of the others had any idea what bit rates were, why it
made a difference, and how to change their ripping setting so that they
didn't play low-rate MP3s to air.

I've no reason to doubt that a portable player can perform equally to a
fixed player provided the audio files are to a decent standard.
Unfortunately, the Great Public have no knowledge of or interest in
maintaining audio standards.

S.