Driving technological change

We were mulling over changing technology, something that’s likely to happen even to the most well-intentioned person.  Being dinosaurs, our consultants have seen plenty of it; and we’ve concluded that we’re terrible at predicting it.  What we thought most likely hasn’t come to pass, and actual inventions have caught us unprepared.  But maybe we see a certain trend, in retrospect.

Consider recorded music.  If you put on an old 78 rpm record (assuming a museum will let you have one), you’ll be struck immediately by the high level of noise and the generally muddy sound.  You will not be able to pick out distinct instruments in a symphony orchestra for the most part, though the clarinet of an old jazz piece will generally break through.  The path of improvement seemed set when, after the Second World War, the 33 1/3 rpm “long playing” record became common, then stereo and Hi-Fi: High Fidelity, meaning something closer to actually being in the room with the band.

It was, however, not car-friendly.  To play a record you needed a stable platform, and a car was anything but stable.  To listen to your favorite songs while tooling down the highway you had to tune in your favorite radio station.  And the quality of sound from an AM radio was, to put it mildly, not going to compete with a live performance.  But it was. . . convenient.

Then there appeared the cassette tape.  It was a miniature version of the tape-recording technology of the professionals.  It was, in quality, not an advance on the vinyl record.  But you could listen to it in your car.  You could even load it into your Walkman and listen to it as you jogged down the bike path.  It was convenient.

Then came digitized sound, first the CD (which was actually not more convenient than the cassette tape) and then the file stored on your computer.  No longer did you need the towers and racks of recorded media; everything was in some invisible form that took up no physical space.  You were dependent on the quality of your computer’s speakers, rarely optimized for fine acoustic performance, but gained cubic feet of room in your apartment.

Now everything’s on your smart phone, streamed from somewhere else, and (if you’re reasonably polite) you listen to your music via earphones.  These have no doubt been vastly improved since the days of the transistor radio; but their overwhelming virtue is convenience.

Of course there is a countering current.  A subculture of audiophiles invested amazing amounts in amplifiers and speakers, turntables and tuners, seeking ever-better sound; and still does.  But the driving force of audio technological change for at least the past half-century has been convenience.

Maybe we’ve gotten as convenient as we can get, and technology will change in another direction.  It’s hard for us to imagine anything easier than calling up a tune by the flick of a finger; but our imagination has failed us before.  Meanwhile, we’re seeking out local venues hosting live bands.