A Brief History of Portable Music
Devices
In 1979, Sony’s Walkman kicked off the popularity of
portable audio equipment in a big way. Featuring a cassette player in a 3.5" x
1.75" x 5.75" enclosure and weighing 14 ounces, when combined with small
headphones it was suddenly possible to take music with you everywhere. Sony sold over a
million of them in the first two years of production.
1982 brought the compact disc onto the market in Japan,
with U.S. models shipping in early 1983. Portable CD players showed up on the market in
1984 when Sony’s Discman started to trickle out. At about 6" square and a couple
of inches high, it was portable but not "joggable." Not only was the larger size
a problem, the mechanics of the laser playback mechanism meant the minute you started
moving at any speed the player would skip. By the ‘90s, portable CD players would add
computer-style memory buffers (nowadays in the ten-to-40-second range) to survive some
jarring during playback without skipping, but these never worked all that well and it
didn’t do anything to address the size issues.
In 1987, digital audiotape was introduced. While very small
and having excellent sound quality, DAT mechanisms were expensive to produce and, as a
result, they never caught on with the public at large. Portable DAT systems are still used
to this day for field recording by sound engineers and musicians.
Attempted replacements for the cassette-style players have
appeared a couple of times. In 1992 Sony’s MiniDisc and Philips’ Digital Compact
Cassette both featured upgraded sound quality over cassette tape at a similarly small
size. DCC players were backward compatible in that they would play your existing
cassettes. Since relatively few titles were released in pre-recorded form for these
systems, most consumers bought blank media and made their own recordings. The main problem
was that you still had to covert your original media, probably on CD, to the new format.
This normally took as long as the music did to play, so if you had an album on CD it would
be 45 minutes or more before you could produce a version of that same album on MD or DCC
to take with you. Add to that the costs of the blank media and complaints about the sonic
artifacts of the compression and the whole system was just too inconvenient for most
people. MiniDisc remains popular in some parts of the market, including a fairly large
following in Japan, and the audio fidelity of its ATRAC compression scheme has improved
enormously since release.
In 1989, the German Fraunhofer Institute was granted a
local patent on the MP3 format, and it was incorporated into the ISO-MPEG specification in
1993. A raw CD requires about ten megabytes of data per minute of playback; MP3 files can
easily shrink this by a factor of ten.
1997 was the year when MP3 files started becoming popular
for computer use. The original AMP MP3 Playback Engine would morph into the powerful and
easy to use WinAmp in 1998 and really kick that scene into high hear.
In October of 1998, Diamond introduced the Rio PMP 300, an
MP3 player using 32MB of flash memory that could hold about one album full of compressed
music. The main advantages of the player were its very small size (similar to a pager) and
no moving parts that would skip. But the MP3 compression level required (64Kbps or so) to
fit anything useful in the memory, combined with a measly 5mW of output power on the
headphone jack, resulted in awful sound. A flurry of similar products followed, and this
whole category helped popularize MP3 as a music-storage format.
June of 1999 introduced Napster to the world. By making it
far easier to download MP3 files than any previous software of its type, Napster helped
push the whole concept of playing music files on your computer into the mainstream.
They’d only last a little over two years before being completely shutdown by court
order. More decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have recently cropped up, most using
the Gnutella network technology.
In November of 1999 the Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox
player -- the first of its type to use a hard drive -- premiered on the market. Its 5GB of
storage would hold around 80 hours of music, the headphone jack had closer to 50mW of
drive, and there was enough space to spare that you could encode your MP3 files at 320Kbps
if you wanted to. A 10MB buffer cached data off the hard drive to help prevent skipping if
the hard drive got bounced around.
Sometimes audio product innovation comes from sources you
don’t usually associate with the industry. Normally the hard drives you’ll find
in laptop computers are 2.5" in size. In April of 2001, Toshiba started shipping
their MK5002MAL, which shrinks that standard form factor to 1.8" instead, while still
packing in 5GB or more of data. This opened the possibility for an even smaller
hard-disk-based product.
On October 23, 2001 Apple introduced the iPod, based on the
compact Toshiba drives. Initially available in a 5GB capacity, the iPod plays MP3 files at
resolutions up to 320Kbps, but can also play full CD-quality WAV or AIFF files. Toshiba
now produces those drives in 10GB and 20GB models, and Apple has incorporated those larger
capacities into their product line. Each iPod includes a 32MB buffer to cache data from
the drive, aiming at skip prevention as well as improving battery life; once the buffer is
filled the hard drive can be spun down for several minutes. As of April 28, 2003, iPod
capacity is now up to 30GB.
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