Where do you think we will be in 50 years with technology with regard AV - Audio ?

TOBYJUG posted:

Might just go the other way. What with world war 3 and 4 and 5 draining resources of industry. We might be lucky with a tin can and string.

I'm not so sure - war drives technological development forwards like nothing else. 

WW I and II perhaps, in certain specific areas. Any modern major conflagration ......I suspect not.

M

I won't last more than 25 years so my current system will last till then.  The whole technology and VR thing scares me, I see more isolation in society.  Blade Runner 5.0?

Yep aka True Lies .... maybe one day the human conciouness and spirit could be captured and live in a computerised virtual world where music could be free of constraints of the ear!!!! Maybe that would be hell ulp...... or perhaps bliss .... see you there some day.....

There will be three market segments: commercial audio, professional audio and personal audio (i.e., wireless head-/earphones + portable room audio, i.e., Muso-typed offerings with rechargeable batteries).

The ultra-high end in what we know to be the residential market will exist only as an extension of the professional audio space and will be enthusiast-driven; the specialist interconnect market will collapse and disappear. Passive loudspeakers will be a figment of the past, except as intentionally-distorted / bandwidth-limited offerings (i.e., guitar amps).

As an intermediate step, the musical instrument market channel will absorb what exists today as mass-market two-channel hi-fi retail, though it will continue to struggle until both markets disappear entirely (Gibson, anyone?). Acoustic and electric instruments will become strictly ultra high-end offerings, sold through boutique channels (as would be high-end professional gear).

The commercial audio space will be entirely networked, as is trending today, and electronic musical instruments will be fully integrated into the control layer. Content will be authenticated from source to drain.

Video and home theater will cease to be the driving force for consumer electronics standardization; Apple / Google / Facebook (or their successors at the top of the heap) will set the standards, not Sony / Matsushita. TVs and projectors will become the second screens to tablets and phones, not the other way around (as is currently), and will eventually be replaced by virtual / augmented / whatever reality. Broadcast TV will be just a memory, as will be terrestrial radio.

Wireless portable audio will become the most important, if not already commoditized, product space; microphones will have authenticated streams (as will voice-recognition devices) to assure downstream consumers (thermostats, home security, etc.). All power supplies will be battery-driven, using AC mains (or a DC standard!) strictly for charging purposes, not operation.

All in all, the middle of the market will disappear, but the entry-level products will become significantly better enough that smaller specialist manufacturers will no longer be able to survive, due to the requirements of certification / authentication that the market will require.

Samsung will have figured out how to weather the storm, having set their feet into each of the above-named market spaces with intent in the early part of this century. Watch them carefully.

Some of these things are happening already, though past experience indicates that a complete transition takes about a generation to fully complete (witness the rise and fall of optical discs for content delivery).

I wonder if music itself will change all that much in the next 50 years. I still listen regularly to music from 1967, so I think it is probably safe to assume that some percentage of people in 2067 will still want to listen to old time classics from 2017.

I'd also bet that some percentage of those future music lovers will even want to listen on "period correct" kit, like a vintage Naim Atom.