Do you think in 50-100 years time there will be a new medium of how music is created/logged? I imagine people recording onto tape in the 1950s never thought we'd be running DAWs and plugins that emulate their equipment, or is digital the highest quality we'll ever see music get to?

 

I dont think so, i do think however the bitrate and bit depth will continue to increase with the increase in technological advances in read write speeds etc and storage expansions becoming cheaper. Standard listening mediums will become WAV's instead of mp3s or some new type of format which gets rid of any aliasing etc. I guess after that it might be a step towards 7.1 or some form of surround sound tech being the norm.

 

can't f*ckin wait to hear the almighty rihAnna and bieber in even better audio quality

 

If any of the crazy science fiction predictions from Ray Kurweil and the like are realised then maybe an augmented human ear could be designed that allowed bat like hearing in humans. I doubt it'd be used for listening to music but I'm sure that there are tonnes of use cases for augmented hearing.

Other than that, wireless headphones within a few years ?

 

The question is a bit strange if you consider what digital really means. An analogous signal has an infinite resolution, while digital signals have a finite one. This means, we already had the highest quality, then went back by introducing digital tech (which sampled the analog waveform's infinite resolution at just some thousand points per second with only 15 steps width), and since then we are trying to reach an acceptable percentage of the perfect analog quality (with studios currently accepting 24 bit/96kHz).
I think the next big step will not happen before quantum computers are a mass product. A quantum bit is a lot more analog-like, as it stores not just one but an (theoretically) infinite number of states. The problem of quantum computers nowadays is to exactly anticipate, which state we will be seeing, when accessing the bit.

 

Yeah is funny, because analog was the higher quality(of course when every component in analog chain were good quality)

 

Within 20 years from now, people will plug earbuds-like electrodes in to optical-audio jacks implanted near the ears, feeding into receptors bypassing the cochleal formation and connecting directly to the nerves dedicated to carrying aural stimulus to the cerebral cortex. Or something like that. DARPA is whippin'-up some scary transhumanistic shit, I tellya.

 

We do our best to imitate creation, half step by half step, never quite reaching the wall.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 18, 2016

Speakers are going to be history since it's old fashion to have mechanical moving parts,
it's very energy consuming and could be done otherwise, and with more fidelity

 

When 3D printers finally become available people will print tape studer machines,high end mics,expensive instruments and rediscover why humans already discovered perfection a long time ago

 

Almost! Our ears are working mechanically, so we will always need something that moves air particles in waves. But, correct, in doesn't need to be speakers. I could imagine some electrostatic metal device with the size of a golfball, that you just place somewhere in the room and then it moves the air in this room for a infinite.infinite surround sound. Probably even so detailed, that you can choose which instrument you want to be near (walking to the back of the room your ears jam with the drummer, walking in front to virtually step on the singer's toes, etc.)

And that all (remember quantum computing) at a fraction of the storage size we need today. And of course, Microsoft holds all the patents and let's us pay 30,000 USD per minute of streaming. Which is kind of cheap considering that quarterpounder of artificial lab beef costs 42,999 USD and a Coke 31,599 USD. Lower class jobs will get you an income of awesome 195,000 USD a week, though...

 

"Analog" and "digital" are terms too vague to even really have this discussion. It's almost like asking, "Is there ever going to be anything brighter than fire?"

What defines quality? Accuracy of waveshape? Preservation of signal compared to noise? Elimination of time-compression / time-expansion artifacts?

What more do you want from modern digital?

 

First of all, *digital* is only one possible representation of an audio signal and says nothing about quality.
"Logging" music as you say can be done digitally (i.e. numerically), on tape (relying on magnetic memory that changes over time), on mechanical (vinyl) or optical (cd/dvd) matter and in thousand other possible ways.
I believe that the cheapest, highest-capacity, smallest and maybe fastest storage medium will most likely determine the future of how music will be stored, not the other way 'round. If it's digital, then so be it, if it's biological/chemical, who knows we'll have A/B (Analogue/Biological) or A/C (Analogue/Chemical) converters soon.
Bye-bye USB port, welcome cell pipeline ;-)

 

Well, it wasn't about what someone expects from digital, but what other tech might replace digital. It needs a lot of fantasy to think so far into the future. You need to let go what we have now.

 

That's wrong. Digital says a lot about quality, as it is never copying the original sound, but only an approximation (read about A/D and D/A converters to learn more about it). Also, on tape is analog, on vinyl is analog, optical is digital

 

In 50 years time I'll be lucky if I'm breathing, let alone be able to hear anything.

 

I was thinking of collision of waves, since we come to be adept stereo placement.

That says nothing about digital other than our digital limits at this time,
a copy of the original sound is actually as close as it gets.
approximation is something we have to live with at this point.

 

That's entirely false.

Optical is digital? Ever hear of laserdisc? Tape is analog? Ever hear of DAT?

Analog is the best? Ever hear of wax cylinders? Digital is the best? How come 8-bit samplers sound "worse" than a well-maintained reel-to-reel?

 

To improve "quality" you need to correct a deficit. What is the deficit?

 

I'm sorry, but you still confuse a technology (digital/analog) with storage devices. It doesn't make much sense to tell you about the differences of analog and digital, if you're not even accepting the nature of those.