It’s a Brave New Connected World for Home Audio and Visual Media
How the internet and wireless connected systems are changing audio and visual media within our homes. Is fully digital – non tangible video and audio becoming the norm?
If you have found yourself wanting to get a new audio or TV system, you will have probably noticed just how much choice you have and how many more possibilities there are to bring sound to your home. Many of use still have a large collection of CD’s, DVD’s or even older media such as tapes and vinyl but these days you don’t even need to touch hard-copy media.
Everything these days can be connected in some form or another but the most popular way is using internet wireless routers. Most of us are already using them with our computers, tablets and smartphones but did you know you can do it with some audio systems? Network connected audio devices are now available where you can download, store and stream your favourite music to other rooms in your household. You can use the hard-drive in your computer or a network attached storage (NAS) to convert your CD’s to high quality FLAC (free lossless audio codec) and even use downloaded 24-bit studio quality music files.
It’s not just your network connected audio that you can receive and play your music collection. If you have portable media devices such as a tablet computer or a smart-phone you can access your collection anywhere with a network with access to the internet. With such innovations in place music lovers are freed from just confining their enjoyment to just one room and could have smaller satellite systems in places such as the bedroom and kitchen. For those that are on the move can access their collection on the commute to work and even on holiday in other countries.
Home visual media is also benefiting from the new connected nature of multiple systems. TV’s can now be routinely found to be able to connect to home networks and the internet which is turning them into media hubs, where you can download or stream music and movies online. The proliferation of high-definition movies and program content is giving the perfect excuse to take your TV experience and turn it into a home cinema showcase. Virtually all modern movies come with multi channel soundtracks and most audio and video devices support additional speaker configurations. For those that have not experienced the difference that a home cinema system can have when viewing high-definition content will be surprised to the difference it makes to the enjoyment of your favourite movies.
Moving on there would be an increasing shift towards a fully digital, non hard copy attitude to the media available to us. We would no longer need tangible media such as disks as we would have all our acquired media be them music, movies, video, written and photography would all be stored in storage that we personally may or may not own in our homes. For media we have not made ourselves there would be access rights that we have bought so even if we somehow loose our media libraries we could still re-acquire what we had stored in them. There may be discussions as to if we would still prefer to own tangible media but I would think they would just gather dust somewhere like my current CD collection does.