When some companies produce a music player, they continually look to add features based on consumer feedback. Consider Cowon and Archos as two prime examples; they are constantly tweaking the firmware, and both have active online communities that actually seem to influence the future of the product. So WTF with Apple? The company has gotten so focused on taking someone’s great idea and running with it innovating that they wind up virtually abandoning the idea of improving — not just fixing — their products in between major launches.
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Ever since Tower Records closed its doors for good late last year, I’ve been wondering about what record stores are going to be like in, say, 10 years’ time. Will they be nothing more than rooms full of self-serve digital music kiosks? People are buying digital music online in droves, and there’s only growth in sight as broadband penetration [eeeww] marches on and new distribution models emerge. Perhaps the right question to ask is: Will record shops even exist?
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Traveling through the Scottish countryside with fellow writer Todd Seavey, who has written a couple of storylines for Justice League comic books, I began to doze off. Todd had just told me one of his storylines, so I began daydreaming about the various members of the League in terms of how these heroes might make use of bleeding-edge sonic weaponry. After all, even superheroes can benefit from military technology. Here, true believers, is what bubbled up from the depths of my jetlagged brain.
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So I’m here in Scotland with Audiofile Mike. It turns out that this home of The Highlander and hooliganism not only takes credit for bringing the world television, penicillin, and cloned sheep, but is now a steaming hotbed of new nanotechnology research. We spent the past week checking out bleeding edge nano, including ways of using OLED lights to smooth out skin cancer, microscopic machines that defy gravity, and digestible pills capable of making Innerspace-like trips through your bowels.

As Ottilia Saxl, founder of the Institute of Nanotechnology here put it, “I call nanotechnology science faction — like science fiction, but factual.”

This week we’re taking a look at the next wave of nanotech research that should change how we do just about everything.

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I spend a good amount of time at my officelocal neighborhood pub, Harefield Road, where I’ve gotten a reputation for fixing iPods, among other things. One of the pub’s owners, Peter “C.J.” Egan, has brought his 4th generation iPod to the pub a couple of times with some odd problems, and I’ve managed to have great success in fixing it with unorthodox methods.
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If you haven’t already noticed, the number of patent trolls and sneaky me-first companies suing over digital audio-related patents is approaching infinity. What happens when it actually gets there? We’d get sucked into an another dimension in which the laws of physics still hold, but patent laws break down. A dimension beyond sight and sound. We have entered… the Unpatented Zone. (Doo-doo-doo-doo… doo-doo-doo-doo.)

On streets littered with fairy dust (or is that silicon?), happy-go-lucky consumers prance about with earbuds jammed into their ears. But although they bear the telltale whiteness of familiarity, these are no ordinary earbuds. They’ve got funny-shaped silicone tips on them for a “stable fit and lifelike sound,” despite the lack of any apparent Bose logo. Suddenly a child shakes her head vigorously, and an earbud threatens to pop out — only to be held in place by a very Ultimate Ears-like flexible ear loop. A slight chill runs down your spine, but you press on to the public square (or is it a squircle?) just ahead.
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What’s a hard-core gamer or action-movie lover to do about having late-night fragging sessions or Matrix screenings without driving their spouse or neighbors nuts? While there are plenty of consumer 5.1-channel headphones on the market, if you want cans that give you a truly convincing surround-sound listening experience, you’ve got to be a military sonar operator or aircraft pilot. Here’s a dumbed down gracefully simplified explanation of what works and what doesn’t, as well as a bit about how you hear.
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On Valentine’s Day, as I was perusing Time Out New York looking for something lame romantic to do, I came across a roundup of music-activated sex toys that you can plug an iPod into. It got me to wondering: Just how far does the iPod’s reach extend into our lives? I decided to see how many different ways one can incorporate the iPod into a typical day, and I admit, I was shocked.
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The music industry should be in a state of panic right now, but not because of piracy. The confusion surrounding digital music and the future of DRM was compounded this week by Steve Jobs’s open letter to the recording industry. And if the responses from the Norwegian Consumer Council and the RIAA were graded like reading comprehension questions on the SAT, neither group would make it past high school.
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Windows Vista Intimate Edition fits in many orifices.

Amid the Windows Vista hooplah this week, I wondered whether it will make a difference to my ears—I mean, besides having to hear Robert Fripp every time I start my Windows box. The new audio capabilities that are included in Microsoft’s latest OS highlight MS’s push even further into your living room, and from what I’ve seen online, people seem to be pretty excited about them.
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As a journalist covering digital audio, I can’t help feeling like I’m not really contributing to the welfare of the world at large. Sure, music is important to our physical well-being, and hearing it with the utmost clarity and detail is an integral part of the experience for many. But there are bigger issues in the world, like hunger, disease, war, poverty, and the proliferation of reality television. So what’s the booming digital audio world—one of the fastest-growing industries around—doing about all this?
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Can someone tell me why virtually nothing is happening with MP3 players in regards to actual audio quality? In fact, audio quality seems to be moving ass-backwards, giving way to non-audio features like video and wireless. Headphones have come such a long way in the last 15 years or so, and now we have dual- and triple-driver in-ear models designed specifically for use with portables. The problem is that most MP3 players’ headphone outputs flat-out suck.
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Face it, DRM is here to stay. Sure there are cracks (thanks DVD Jon!), file-sharing networks, and Bit Torrent, but the fact is many people are still buying digital music online legally. Some pundits say DRM is either doomed to failure or harmful to the consumer experience because of its increasing lack of interoperability, but I see a clear path through the DRM labyrinth. One company in particular, Navio, has been trying hard to create a new paradigm of ownership for digital content—so-called rights-based commerce. So why hasn’t this potentially brilliant idea taken off yet?

It’s not rocket science why purchasing rights to digital music (and other content) is a good idea. You go to an artist’s web site or an online store and purchase the rights to a song, and those rights are stored in a “digital locker”. In some cases, you’d download the appropriately DRM-ed file directly from the site, while in other cases, you would receive a set of license codes for various online stores and download the appropriate file there.
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Audio has been moving steadily toward higher fidelity and resolution as components become cheaper and more advanced. If it ain’t 24-bit and 192kHz, many people simply aren’t interested. But this week, I’m looking in the opposite direction: 8-bit music. A whole community of musicians use modified handheld gaming devices like Nintendo Game Boys and NES boxes as live musical instruments, thanks to hardware modifications and software sequencers. At first I couldn’t decide whether this is an unholy marriage of adolescent video game obsession with rockstar dreams or a legitimate art form, but my experience at last weekend’s Blip Festival—a series of performances, discussion panels, and screenings celebrating 8-bit music and visual art—cleared things up for me a bit.
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