The Post-High Fidelity Era

Internet streaming and mp3’s are teaching us some important lessons about changing consumer expectations about audio quality. The Wall Street Journal reports this week that consumers are compromising a pristine level of sound reproduction for convenience and portability. This isn’t exactly headline news for any of us, but I think we haven’t begun to fully consider the implications for us in broadcasting.

The internet shows us that, assuming a minimum level of quality, consumers will choose quantity over quality. NPR’s audience testing shows that listeners can’t tell much difference between CD-quality digital music and a 48kb/s stream of the same music on an HD stream. Perhaps the more correct way to say this is that listeners might hear a difference, but for them, it’s a completely acceptable trade-off for having more choices.

I bet you can think of several ways that you’ve made this compromise. I spend several hours a day listening to soma.fm’s Groove Salad internet stream while I work. I’ve pruned my CD collection as I’ve ripped the CD’s into my iTunes library. I listen to my iPod in the car using an FM transmitter, rather than CD’s. We’re about to sell the big Klipsch speakers in the living room; the likely replacement for our stereo and TV – the Apple Hifi.

As broacasters and programmers, we need to consider carefully what consumers are telling us about how the listen to music and the kinds of compromises they’re willing to make in return for other perceived benefits. This should guide our multicasting strategies for radio.

And I’m beginning to wonder how this might play out on TV. Consumers appear to be sending a very clear message about HDTV; they’re buying giant HD screens by the thousands. But I think if you look deeper, you’ll find that most of them are taking their sets home, hooking up the DVD player, plugging in analog cable, or SD digital satellite, and are watching the 4:3 signals stretched across their 16:9 screens. In other words, most of what they’re watching now actually looks worse than it did on their old TV’s – it’s flattened and stretched and more grainy; but it’s on a brighter, bigger screen.

It’s too early to draw many conclusions from this. If more of the popular cable networks were in HD, for instance, it might be easier to judge viewing patterns. But I do find myself wondering if, ultimately, viewers will seek out HD where the content demands it – movies, drama, nature docs, etc – and will be happy will SD quality for much of the rest of what they see. (Will viewers care if you spend half a million dollars to convert your local news to HD?) That compromise ultimately means more choices in the available bandwidth and if there’s anything that consumers seem to be saying clearly so far in this vast transformation of broadcasting, choice is important.