Has the audio industry lost its imagination?

If you read the glossy audio magazines (audio enthusiasts still buy them), or spend some time browsing Amazon, you’ll see an audio industry which appears to be in good health.  Depending on your personal preferences you can get something that’s smaller, shinier, lossless, retro, or virtually any adjective you can think of.  But if you strip off the marketing glitz, it’s questionable whether audio quality has improved much in the last seventy years.

For the first 25 years, families huddled around horns.  Then, in 1925, loudspeakers appeared, bringing sound to everyone in a room.  The industry spent the next quarter century improving quality, to the point where most music lovers thought that audio reproduction was about as good as it was going to get.  1950s and 60s novels were populated with characters enthusing about their preamplifiers and graphic equalisers as they listened to the finer points of Mozart and Beethoven. 

Then the focus changed.  Other priorities took over, as multiple disruptions changed the way we listen to music.  What’s interesting is that each of these disruptions was accompanied by a reduction in audio quality, as consumers decided that other features were more important.  It’s not a message that the audio industry likes to acknowledge, as trying to push “higher” quality often seems to be the limit of their imagination.  But history suggests they may be about to have another shock.  So, let’s look at the reality of what happened.  It all started in 1957 with:

The Transistor Radio  –  Portability

If you’ve ever listened to an early transistor radio, you’ll probably remember how bad it was.  The very first one was made by Texas Instruments – one of the original semiconductor companies.  They ended up making the radios themselves, because no audio company wanted to be associated with their appalling audio quality.  A few years later Sony come out with the TR-57, which still sounded pretty poor, but offered a generation of teenagers something new – the opportunity to listen to music wherever they were.  The young audience loved it, and a new market was born.  Not one driven by audio quality, but by portability.  The one downside was that they could only listen to what was currently being broadcast by their local radio stations.  But independent innovation would change that, with the appearance of pirate radio stations, much to the chagrin of the recording industry.  Twenty years later, the industry got another shock, with the arrival in 1979 of:

The Sony Walkman  –  Personalisation

Compact cassettes had been developed by Philips in 1963, shortly after the advent of the transistor radio.  The quality of the early tapes was poor, as they’d originally been developed for dictation, but Dolby came along to help improve that.  Although popular, sales were slow until Sony, who had negotiated a free licence to the format, launched the Walkman.

The Walkman packed a player into a package that would fit in a pocket and freed everyone from the constraints of listening to the choice of a broadcaster.  For the first time, you could listen to your choice of music wherever and whenever you wanted.  As tape players evolved into tape recorders, you could even make your own mix tapes.  For the first time in the history of audio, users could copy what they liked, much to the exasperation of the recording industry, who started prosecuting users and deminading a tax on blank tapes.  Having lost control of broadcast music to the pirate radios, individuals could now join in subverting copyright and share their own music.  Incidentally, the first Sony Walkman had two 3.5mm audio jacks, so two people could plug in their headsets and listen at the same time.  That option rapidly disappeared.  We don’t know whether that was due to pressure from the recording industry, who wanted each listener to buy their own cassette, or Sony accountants trying to save half a yen on each Walkman.

The only drawback to cassettes was their propensity to break or become entangled in the player.  But that was about to be fixed, with:

The CD – Convenience

Sony and Philips collaborated once again to bring the world another format – the audio CD, which digitised the musical content.  Promoted as a way of avoiding those annoying scratches and noise, with the added advantage of instant access to any track, CDs quickly eclipsed audio cassettes as the preferred way for the industry to sell music.  Initially, CDs were the answer to the recording industry’s dreams – a format that they thought was far too complex to be copied.  That assumption forgot the speed of innovation in the PC industry, which quickly decided that selling software on CDs was preferable to selling it on floppy discs.  It didn’t take the PC industry long to develop recordable CDs, allowing users to copy the CDs they’d bought, blowing another hole through audio copyright.  To add insult to injury, being digital, every music track copied was as good as the original.  A small audiophile segment bemoaned the loss of detail that resulted from the digitalisation, but the vast majority of consumers loved the convenience.

MP3 – Distribution

There have long been international standards bodies for telephony, photography, television, video, computing and wireless technologies – all working collaboratively to improve the way that products work and devising ever better formats for the content that they support.  The one conspicuous absence is the audio industry, which has mostly relied on audio companies like Philips and Sony to bring out new technology and then codify that as a de facto standard that could be licensed.  That lack of common, industry research is probably why they were blind-sided by the introduction of the MPEG standard.

MPEG stands for the Motion Picture Expert Group – an international standards group which works on developing compression technology for video, with the aim of making distribution and storage more efficient.  The bulk of their work concentrates on compression techniques for the video element, but includes support for the associated audio.  The group launched its first specification – MPEG-1 in 1993, which included a “layer III” that describes a lossy compression format for audio.  This is a psychoacoustic codec, which works by discarding elements of a sound which most people can’t hear.  That typically results in compressed audio files which are a tenth of the size of the digital files used for a CD.  The Layer III element quickly became known as MP3 and provided the next stage of disruption to the audio  industry. 

The small size of MP3 files meant that it became possible to record multiple albums on a CD, and hundreds of tracks on a hard drive.  While recording industry lawyers fumed about copyright infringement, the PC industry began to compete with traditional audio hardware companies.  Microsoft introduced media servers, and Apple changed the way we carry music around with the introduction of the iPod. 

Although purists railed about the quality of the compressed audio stream, users loved the convenience.  Initial “pirate” music services like Napster and SoundJam paved the way for applications like iTunes and Spotify, radically changing the way that we purchase and listen to music.  After a century of a business model which had taught consumers to buy physical copies of music, whether that was on record, cassette or CD, users had unwittingly moved to hiring it. 

Increasingly, their product of choice for delivering their music was a smartphone.  That left audio manufacturers with a problem.  With few exceptions, they had given away the market for audio hardware, as users placed convenience over absolute quality.  Good enough was indeed good enough for everyone except a small group of audiophiles.

 AirPods –  Ubiquitous usability

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2015, a small German startup called Bragi won an innovation award for a new product – a set of Bluetooth earbuds.  Bragi realised that audio was all about ears, designing an earbud which not only played music from your phone, but also contained an MP3 player, as well as microphones which could be used for phone calls.  They even added a range of biometric health sensors.  It was a revolutionary concept that put the ear at the centre of audio design.  The only problem was that it was incredibly difficult to squeeze all of that functionality into something as small as an earbud.  Several companies tried to make them over the next few years, but it took the engineering resources of Apple to turn the concept into a viable product, launching their earbuds in late 2016.  They became the fastest selling consumer product ever.  Once again, innovation had come from outside the traditional audio industry, leaving traditional manufacturers to play catch-up, having to rely on their brand value to retain customers, rather than leading through innovation.

What’s Next?

This brings us to the important question of what’s next?  The answer seems to be that the audio industry doesn’t know.  They’ve seen other sectors eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner.  As a result they seem to concentrate more and more on the audiophile segment, trying to convince users to buy something they can’t hear, or slapping on an AI label.  As with every other sector, AI is going to be important, although the current audio thinking seems to be reversing the initialism with a concentration on Immersive Audio, either as tridimensional or spatial audio.  Intelligence doesn’t seem to be present in their thinking.

This isn’t to say that the industry is not in rude health.  But it feels that it’s just more of the same, banking on the hope that no more disruption is imminent.  History suggests that won’t be the case.

Since MP3 arrived, audio quality has improved significantly.  Bluetooth’s new LC3 codec gives a quality that most users can’t distinguish from the original, suggesting that effort put into even more advanced codecs is akin to producing a suit of new clothes for audiophiles. 

What’s interesting is that a variety of other initiatives are suggesting what that next change could be, which is a shift from the personal nature of audio, where the market approach is to sell music as a purely personal pleasure.  The industry has long tried to define users by their music collection or playlist, emphasising their unique musical taste.  Which is very different to the way we experience live music, which is invariably social.  The very first Walkman recognised that sharing might be desirable, with its two audio jack sockets, but that quickly disappeared.  However, various different bodies are starting to look at new models of listening.  Bluetooth is seeing increasing traction with its Auracast™ standard.  Originally designed to help people with hearing loss, it’s now incorporated into a growing range of phones and speakers for music sharing. 

Over the last seventy years, the audio industry has repeatedly been disrupted by innovation coming from outside.  It looks as if that may be about to repeat itself.  Once again, consumers may find themselves in a position to make choices which the industry may not like, but will have to follow.  Which will probably be a lot more exciting than waiting for the audio industry to innovate.