MP3 CD Players?

Mischa asks: The nonmechanical mp3 players, such as the Rio and now the Nomad, but where is Sony/Panasonic/(insert fav corp here) and their cd player that can handle mp3s? A 64 meg memory stick is great, but it doesn't compare to the 650 meg storage of a CD, or the 2+ gigs of a DVD. Are the reasons for their conspicuous absence political, technological, or just plain dumb? :) " Actually, I think it's more due to the current industry view of MP3s. A CD holding 650 minutes of music is going to make the prevailent practice of selling a 74 minutes for $15 look bad. I'm personally all for something like this, and I had heard of projects like this to get MP3s to play on desktop boxes, but nothing really portable.

Comments

Hardware, politics and legal precedent...

[Baraka]

Yep, it's primarily about those three things, in my own personal opinion. During the past couple of years or so, I've often wondered why a Discman-like portable CD player that can play both mp3's and regular CD's, hasn't been brought to market. I even thought quite a bit about building one myself, although I never had the engineering experience to get it off the ground.

Regarding the hardware issue, up until around 18 months ago, it just wasn't very cost effective for most large corporate entities to build a portable device that could do real time, or near-real time audio decompression. A powerful enough DSP, like something out of the Motorola 56300 series, was just too costly to develop a consumer product upon. This is probably the least significant impediment of the three, as consumer technologies will be produced that are outside the domain of the average consumer (HDTV anyone?), nevertheless it was a logical impediment at one time.

Eventually, though, the MPMan and the Diamond Rio were produced, albeit for some comparatively hefty prices. The production of the MPMan probably was of some concern to the various parties "protecting" the rights of artists, but the Rio was really what frightened them. Diamond Multimedia, a fairly large consumer electronics firm, was encroaching upon their interests, so the RIAA took them on in court. We all know what happened. Diamond set legal precedent, but drew some obvious ire from the recording industry by doing so. Since then, Diamond jumped on to the SDMI corporate bandwagon, to make nice with the RIAA and only one other consumer electronics firm- Creative Labs- has brought out a competing product. What about Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sharp and all the other large electronics corporations out there; why haven't they come out with any competing products? Well, one of the main reasons is that a lot of these companies have direct interests within the recording industry. Sony, as we all know, owns a record company. Others are either investors in record companies, or they believe that they stand to lose much from a falling out with the establishment.

Imagine that you're the CEO of one of these corporations. Do you really want to risk getting blacklisted by the recording companies and by doing so, risk investor confidence in your company's stock? I really don't think so. These large companies like certainty. It pays to protect the status quo, especially if you hold all the cards. Bringing out a product that has the ability to play 150 songs on one, lone CD-R, will turn that status quo on its ear. In some places, like in my country, the recording industry has lobbied the government to impose ridiculous taxes on blank audio recording media. It isn't in their best interests for you to be able to hold that many songs on one CD-R. They will do everything in their power to thwart innovation if they stand to lose anything from the introduction of a new technology, such as mp3.

A smaller firm will have to develop a CD-based player on their own and successfully market it to the public. I'm not talking about Pine's offering, but rather, something from a larger, more established company. Until then, however, a device like this will be hard to come by and it will remain comparatively expensive. It will also obviously be looked upon as a device solely for music pirates by the recording industry, as the sheer volume of compressed music that can be fit onto one CD-R, must scare the hell out of them. They've never liked consumers being able to record their own music, so any sort of compressed audio that empowers the consumer, will compound their fears.

One final thing to consider is that such a device can only possibly appeal to people with access to a CD-R recorder. Right now that market really isn't very large when compared with the amount of people who already own some sort of regular CD player. A corporation might argue that a legitimate market for a portable audio device that'll play mp3's off of a CD-R, just isn't there yet. You can't present that argument for devices that make use of non-volatile solid state memory, as they don't require anything other than a PC and a free parallel port, or some other interface, to facilitate data transfer. This is just a lot more convenient for the general public at this time, who are interested in listening to mp3's away from their computer. I would just love to be able to play mp3 CD-R's on my Sony Discman, as I own a CD-R burner, but you have to think about all of the people who don't have immediate access to something like this.