Stereophiles used to dominate a small elite crowd of hobbyists who have come to appreciate and immensely enjoy the technical advances of the times when stereo first emerged and brought home listening to a higher degree of sonic realism and aural pleasures never before attained with monaural home playback systems. That was in the mid 50s of the last century. Over the years, the stereo sound has become the de facto standard in musical studio recording and playbacks systems.
In the meantime, you have the television that brought moving pictures to the homes where it was formerly a movie house preserve. For a time, movie houses felt threatened by the new consumer technology, but in time, the two lived in symbiotic existence. Culminating in the colored TV and the VHS recording system, home entertainment reached an end of the road the way it was in the late 80s.
Think and Thank Digital
It was not until the introduction of the CD for music in the late 70s and the DVD for movie home playback in the early 90s that the evolution of the home entertainment system enters a new stage. It’s now almost entirely digital. Almost, because the audio that you hear from your speakers will always remain analog as you can never hear digital, it’s all noise.
But that’s is the technology that allows music and moving pictures to be encoded on a small disk and gets decoded or played at home. It was around this time that the home computer PC was also taking shape. It wasn’t coincidental that the digits used to encode the music and video also underpins the basics of the computer instructions that make the PC useful.
It was just a matter of time when the immense digital data that represent the music and the movies became available on the PC as well. All that was needed was the computing power that was growing exponentially almost every year from companies like Intel, AMD for the PC and Motorola for the Mac.
The DVD, High Definition Video and High resolution Audio
Skipping a decade to today, you have high definition television sets displaying true life-like images that can make the best Sony Trinitron TVs of the early 90s look anemic. And you have high resolution music in Audio DVDs and enhanced CDs that can play in 8 channels of immersive surround sounds putting you right in the middle of a performance or concert.
These appliances that play them are virtually computers on their own. The LCD and Plasma Television sets display hundreds of thousands of pixels depending on the size of your screen, each one a veritable computer that interprets the Os and 1s of a digital instruction to show the colors in 16 million variations of each of the frames in a moving picture.
The computing power for this will stagger the scientists working at NASA when they started putting the first man on the moon in 1969. But today, half a century later, reality has caught on with the science fiction of the past. The same can be said of the high resolution music that comes with the latest Blu-ray discs that for now are the elitist versions for the ubiquitous DVDs.
Going digital has the home entertainment strides a reality. Processor chips that decode gigabytes of data stored on those laser disks are just a notch lower than the chips coming from the same makers like Motorola and Intel that supply laptop and PC makers. With computing power making further progress, you can expect home entertainment to get even more real with 3-dimension holographs you see in modern science fiction movies. GP
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