The Basics: MP3 Players
Rare just a few years ago, MP3 players are ubiquitous today, and their popularity is not expected to wane any time soon. Apple’s iPod lineup currently dominates the digital audio player universe, but numerous manufacturers like Creative, SanDisk, and iriver, as well as traditional brands such as Panasonic, Sony, JVC, and Samsung, produce a wide variety of players, many of which are giving the iPods a run for their money.
The category name of MP3 players is a bit of a misnomer, as many digital audio players can store music files in multiple formats. These may include WMA, WAV, ATRAC, OGG, and others, in addition to MP3. iPod has also become a generic name for an MP3 player. This is somewhat ironic, because while iPods can play MP3 files, they primarily operate with AAC files, the format of choice for Apple’s popular iTunes Music Store.
MP3 and other formats utilized by digital audio players are data-compression techniques that drastically reduce the size of the original CD music files. This data-reduction amount is variable: a higher reduction rate (i.e., a lower bit rate) results in a smaller file, but the smaller the file, the poorer the sound quality. At higher bit rates (least compressed, best sounding), the sound comes closest to the original CD recording quality. High-quality audio should at least be sampled at 128 kilobits per second (kbps), which results in an MP3 file of about 4MB for a 3- or 3-1/2-minute track. To combat the loss of sound quality, a number of newer digital audio players incorporate technology that helps restore sound details lost during the compression/decompression process.
Continue Reading September 20th, 2006
What was in the Hatch? The cliffhanger from season one of Lost was answered in its opening sequences, only to launch into more questions as the season progressed. That’s right: Just when you say “Ohhhhh,” there comes another “What?” Thankfully, the show’s producers sprinkle answers like tasty morsels throughout the season, ending with a whopper: What caused Oceanic Air Flight 815 to crash in the first place? As the show digs into more revelations about its inhabitant’s pasts, it also devotes a good chunk to new characters (Hey, it’s an island; you never know who you’re going to run into.) First, there are the “Tailies,” passengers from the back end of the plane who crashed on the other side of the island. Among them are the wise, God-fearing ex-drug lord Mr. Eko (standout Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje); devoted husband Bernard (Sam Anderson); psychiatrist Libby (Cynthia Watros, whose character has more than one hidden link to the other islanders); and ex-cop Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez), by far the most infuriating character on the show, despite how much the writers tried to incur sympathy with her flashback. Then there are the Others, first introduced when they kidnapped Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) at the end of season one. Brutal and calculating, their agenda only became more complex when one of them (played creepily by Michael Emerson) was held hostage in the hatch and, quite handily, plays mind games on everyone’s already frayed nerves. The original cast continues to battle their own skeletons, most notably Locke (Terry O’Quinn), Sun (Yunjin Kim) and Michael (Harold Perrineau), whose obsession with finding Walt takes a dangerous turn. The love triangle between Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway), which had stalled with Sawyer’s departure, heats up again in the second half. Despite the bloating cast size (knocked down by a few by season’s end) Lost still does what it does best: explores the psyche of people, about whom “my life is an open book” never applies, and cracks into the social dynamics of strangers thrust into Lord of the Flies-esque situations. Is it all a science experiment? A dream? A supernatural pocket in the universe? Likely, any theory will wind up on shaky ground by the season’s conclusion. But hey, that’s the fun of it. This show was made for DVD, and you can pause and slow-frame to your heart’s content. Just try and keep that head-spinning to a minimum.
Continue Reading September 17th, 2006
