Impact of New Technology (Portable Audio technology and the modern consumer)

IMPACT OF NEW TECHNOLOGY

2006

Impact of New Technology

Introduction

Today , technology possesses a significant effect in the design and marketing process of consumer products , especially electronics . As new inventions discovered , electronic products have also grown in functions and shapes . Recognized or not , these new inventions generally led the way to new trends and cravings within the society of consumers . The change from one technological trend to another is a process involving various technological as well as cultural factors . In this , I will try to identify some of them

using the latest trend of portable audio players . This will elaborate the history of audio players , how the `turn ' to portable audio players occurred and what factors were involved within them History of Audio Players

The first audio players were huge valve-based devices . It was both large and heavy . Automatically the only way we can listen to music is by being restricted to our living rooms . However , sometime in the 60 's , the transistor was discovered . Shortly after , people can listen to the radio without being `tied down ' within their rooms . The very fist portable audio player was actually the 8 track player . It has considerable success , but received heavy critics as well because of its bulk and inconvenience . It could only play 8 track tapes , thus , most tapes must be separated into two or sometimes three parts (`Portable Music Player 2006

The nest generation of portable audio player was the cassette player . In July 1979 , Sony released the first walkman , the Sony TPS-LS2 . It was a small device powered by a 4 AA battery which allow people to listen to cassettes through headphones . The public reaction was incredible . By 1982 , the new trend has set a record on compact cassettes sales number and the walkman itself (`Portable Music Player , 2006

After the walkman , the next generation of trend in portable audio player was the Discman or the CD-player . Many believed that the demise of walkman was the work of Sony itself when the company introduced the D-50 , a portable audio player that can play music straight from a compact disc . For quite some time , the CD player was the dominant portable music player . Afterwards , mini disc players , flash memory players and audio players with an internal memory threatened to replace the CD players , however , the CD player survive because it now reads mp3 CD 's (`Portable Music Player , 2006

The last generation of portable audio players is the Digital Audio Player (DAP . The first DAP was criticized for several issues . First the MP3 s generally do no have better sound quality . People also found it troublesome in transferring s , despite using transfer programs . The issue was then solved as new versions of iTunes became simpler to deal with . Today , the DAP consist of three devices

MP3-Cd player : the device plays audio CD 's and plays data CD 's containing MP3 s

Flash-based player : the device is smaller than the regular CD player . It keeps the audio s in...