Digital Music by Gabriella Cerrato

iPod or iriver Wav, OGG or MP3 S/PDIF or TOSLINK? XLR or RCA? The world of audio gizmos and gadgets has fully entered our lives. Homes, cars and offices are today sophisticated media centers which offer extremely high sound and video quality at very affordable prices. I wonder if it has transformed your house as it has mine. My husband is a fairly serious audio geek and he has slowly but inexorably brought the digital revolution into our home. It all started a few years ago when he purchased the first (for us) Audiotron by Turtle Beach. The Audiotron allows you to transform your PC into a digital jukebox using the home network as illustrated in the figure from the Turtle Beach website. The trick is first to convert your CD-teque into wav files (or MP3 or WMA etc). In order to do this, you need two things: time and disk space. Admittedly, it is very handy to have all your music available and tagged by title, artist, album, track number, genre etc. and to be able to search by criteria, build play-lists etc. Over the years, we have pretty much converted our rather extensive CD collection (we are both music junkies) into wav files, with about half of those files also written to MP3 for our portables. Our entire collection now occupies about 375 GB of space (though my husband assures me that sooner or later we'll have to build the 1 terabyte-plus host of course). We are now proud owners of three Audiotrons, each residing in different rooms of the house (unfortunately the Audiotron has been discontinued by Turtle Beach but has become a cult item in the realm of audio geekdom however, replacement items like the Roku are becoming more and more prevalent). Rest assured that we still purchase CDs, but every CD is immediately converted into wav files and stored on the host. In case you wonder, we never download MP3 from the internet (we are, after all, purists� and only listen to MP3, compressed no lower than 192kBps rate, when necessary, for instance when we work out, etc. Please don't get my husband started on this topic), and the downloads from the host to our digital portable music players happen in a matter of seconds. How speedy, vast and convenient our portable music (and for others, even video) collections have become.

I joke about my husband's technological addiction all the time with my colleagues, but the truth is that I have become entirely addicted to having digital music at my disposal; I can access my music from any room in the house and it is so easy to navigate, sync with my portable device etc. As for the next technological milestone in our homes, I think it will be the communication between car and home network. Imagine, very soon you will be able to choose the music you want to listen to during your commute to the office (or simply copy your files for permanent storage) by wireless communication between your digital media player in your car and your home digital music server. How cool is that?