CDs obsolete in 5 years?

Good point bluefin,

Take into account, if you can store a gigabyte of into in a 1cm cube, say the storage device is 10 cubic centimeters, then you got a nice 10 gigabytes.
You can put far far more information on that than you could a CD. im not sure how much data you can put on a DVD or SACD.

The whole point of MP3 is to compress, the only reason to USE an MP3 is to pack alot of songs on a limited storage space. If the storage space is quite large, then the need for compression is no longer there. You can put the music on uncompressed, and probably at rather high resolution.

Its innovations like this that are not only seafood, but have the potential to be the dessert and show afterwards.

more than a CD killer, this might be better called a possible MP3 killer.

everyone recognizes the fact that MP3 sucks in quality, but the convinience makes it worth while for many people in many applications.
Tell them that they can have the same style of gadgets but hold better than CD quality on it, and they will jump at it.

Mp3 just breaks down when something complex is played through it. especially hard rock. When the going gets tough, the symbals sound warped and the guitars sound muddeled.

The RIAA will kill it with all kinds of copy protection schemes just like they kill all new formats.

A memory device with no moving parts has been an objective for many years, and will soon be practical even for very large blocks of data like the digital representation of high bandwidth music. This is separate from the question of how the digital representation is formatted. A static memory device could output a data stream exactly like that obtained from a spinning disc.

I have no significant experience with MP3, but I gather that this protocol has used data compression as a way to put more music into less data space, with "acceptable" fidelity. However, don't condemn all data compression. It can also be used to provide greater resolution from an available data space. Why leave the highest order bits of your data as zeros throughout most of the music, just so you can make them ones for a few seconds? With a few exceptions (specialized computers in military equipment) computers use Floating Point data format so that they can achieve great accuracy using a reasonable number of bits in a word. Digital music should do this also.

I hope that they do obsolete CDs sooner! I want to buy the old stuff at cheap prices as everyone chases the new format. Just like vinyl;)