Let's consider the two essential aspects of MD as we know it today:
ATRAC encoding and the 2.5" MO storage medium.
Regarding ATRAC: I claim that ATRAC is doomed. Do most people give
that much primacy to sound quality? I think not. The convenience of a
medium wins out time and again. Even vinyl LP bigots I know have sold
their collections because they don't want to deal with the space and
time it takes to store, prep, and play the LPs.
Regarding the 2.5" medium: As others have pointed out, MD as a storage
medium has real advantages over RAM devices. The next challenger, I
think, is hard disk storage. Right now, you can find $100 drives that
can hold about 10GB (~$10/GB) and they aren't nearly as rugged as
MD media. At some point, though, there will be be something that will
be resilient, have the access speed of hard disk, be compact as MD,
and cost $1/GB or less. When this happens, the MD medium will be as
desirable as 3.5" floppies are today.
Taken together, MD/ATRAC won't just go the way of LPs and 12 inch laser
discs. It will suffer the utter oblivion of 8-track tapes, because
other technologies will be able to sound better and take less space.
(But you may still have to pry my cold, dead fingers from my two MD
portables and home deck).
Romain Kang Siemens Info/Comm Products, San Jose R&D
[EMAIL PROTECTED] formerly Pyramid Technology Corporation
Disclaimer: I represent myself alone, except where otherwise indicated.
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