Better Sound For Home Entertainment Coming Your Way

[DudeAsInCool]

In their technology section today, the NY Times takes a look at dramatic changes happening for sound in home entertainment in the article "Better Sound In Small Packages":

....With the popularity of iPods and other hand-held digital music players — 140 million were sold worldwide last year — many consumers have made a similar compromise, trading music fidelity for portability. The era of big-box home loudspeakers with broad-shouldered stereo amplifiers and their full-bodied sound has been overtaken by microchip-driven miniaturization and home theater systems that tend to be optimized for listening to movies, not music.

"The thing that has changed is the consumers' perspective of what they expect from audio," said Dweezil Zappa, the 36-year-old musician who is performing the music of his late father, Frank Zappa, for new audiences. "I think younger consumers aren't familiar at all with really high-quality audio because for them a CD is the best thing they have ever heard."

But innovation is restless, suggested Mahesh Sundaram, vice president for marketing for Audistry, an Australian-based audio company established early this year as a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories. He said technologies that helped put consumers' music at their fingertips could also be used to make that music sound much better than what many have grown accustomed to. "Their reference point is going to shift dramatically," he noted.

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Source: NYTimes Technology