Todd, the loss of quality involved in transcoding digitally-encoded music is nowhere NEAR that of multi-generational analog recording. Not even close. Apples and oranges. Nobody is going to notice the difference in quality, particularly on mobile devices.
The type of loss is similar to that you might encounter, say, converting a JPEG image to a wavelet-compressed image - i.e. dissimilar lossy codecs. Or rotating a JPEG image by decoding, rotation, and recoding. (FWIW and way off-topic, there is a special algorithm for rotating JPEG images losslessly. I highly recommend Picture Information Extractor - PIE - for anyone with a digital camera...) If the compression ratio is high, the results can be awful. But at sufficiently "high quality" compression ratios, the difference in imperceptable, and images will survive many generations of recoding with no perceptable difference.
I maintain that the compression ratios used to encode digital audio in the various lossy schemes being used for music today are sufficiently "high quality" that there will be no perceptable loss through several generations of transcoding. Many, many more generations than with analog tape.
Audio purists will tell you that MP3 and other lossy encodings are evil - the concept of "masking" does not set well with the golden ears. They would rather decide for themselves what they can and can't hear, rather than have sounds taken away from the preemptively. But the argument is only valid for a trained listener using high-end equipment, cutting out 99% of consumers and applications from the equation.
Anyway, I do agree with you that future generations of these products will move from MP3 to wherever the industry lands, and that might mean multiple codecs in the device. But the case for obselecense is over-stated.
And don't fool yourself for a minute that EDIG has the only solution - they don't. The big manufacturers will continue to use in-house-developed firmware because of it's cost-effectiveness. EDIG might eke-out a niche in providing an off-the-shelf solution for new companies entering the market-place, as it would give them a time-to-market advantage, but even then I would expect new players to ultimate go to in-house developed firmware to reduce costs.
I'll let history be my guide regarding this company. And their history is one of repeatedly missing the boat, with a lot of noise and hand-waving (and the occasional stock-price spike) along the way. |
