Easy listening: the hard disk is shaping the future of home entertainment

Custom Home, May-June, 2003 by Rebecca Day

Goodbye VCR and compact disc changer. Hello personal video and audio recorders. The category is so new and amorphous there's still not a uniform acronym to identify it, but hard disk recorders for TV and music are quietly revolutionizing the way people store and distribute TV programs, music, and digital images throughout the home.

Multi-room audio isn't new. Early pioneers of distributed audio used multiple FM tuners to deliver different radio stations to different zones in a home. When the compact disc changer came along, homeowners could listen to their own CDs from remote rooms. Accessing your own music collection was a major step forward, but it wasn't entirely convenient. You had to remember that, say, disc 178 was Miles Davis' Kind of Blue in order to select that disc from the 200-disc changer. If you wanted to create a play list from different jazz CDs, you'd wait maybe 30 seconds or longer between songs as the changer moved from one CD to another.

The hard disk drive is changing all that. Hard disk drives--the same spinning disks that store documents, spreadsheets, and contact databases on a PC--are now being used to store music libraries in ways that make CD changers seem, well, 20th century. A hard disk music server stores music according to different criteria: artist name, song title, CD title, genre--all of which can be accessed immediately in the same way you pull up a Word document or Excel file.

With a hard disk recorder, you no longer organize music according to the limitations of a physical CD. You create play lists according to artist, mood, favorite songs, or any number of personalized choices. Once you've stored the music from a CD onto a hard drive, you can then delete the songs you don't like to free up space for music you do want.

Storage space ranges from huge to enormous depending on the level of compression used to store the music on the drive. A 128-kilobit-per-second file is more compressed than a 320-kbps file, but the sound quality suffers at the expense of space used. The user has the choice to select quality over quantity or vice versa.

As a compressed file, music can be transmitted quickly over a home network that's linked to the Internet. The World Wide Web delivers one of the technology's biggest assets: CD identification that automatically reads out a CD's artist, title, track, time, and genre data. The data is used to identify and organize music, which eliminates the need for users to plug in track and artist info themselves. Owners of CD changers generally had to have an album of liner notes to know which songs were on each disc. When you record a CD onto a hard disk drive, data is automatically displayed by Internet-based CD-recognition services.

So far, audio hard disks have been the domain of companies like ReQuest Multimedia, Linn Products, and Imerge, which have supplied products to the custom market for professional installation. In the past year, the category has gone mainstream, hitting retail shelves with more affordable products that consumers can buy and set up themselves.

The key to the success of these next-gen audio servers is Internet access through a broadband connection (either cable, DSL, or satellite high-speed modern) and a home network. An Ethernet network based on a whole-house Category 5 wiring package provides the most robust backbone, but that solution is primarily reserved for new construction. Solutions are also coming out for existing homes.

Audio supplier Yamaha Electronics has introduced the MusicCast system, which uses an 802.11b wireless network to send compressed music files from a main audio library, or server, to "clients" such as mini music systems located in remote rooms. Up to seven MusicCast systems can exist on the network, with each system providing a separate zone of music. Because of the streaming capability a hard disk provides, each room could access different songs or the same song simultaneously. Each system could even play the same song starting at different times.

Onkyo's Net-Tune audio components are linked to a home network via rear-panel Ethernet jacks. Rather than using an Onkyo audio server to store digital music, the system taps into the hard drive of the home PC and allows up to 12 Net-Tune music systems to play MP3 and Windows Media stored on a PC's hard drive. Although Net-Tune uses Ethernet, the system can also work in existing homes that don't have Cat 5 wiring. Onkyo suggests an Ethernet-to-powerline bridge, which allows consumers to use a home's standard AC wiring to create a home network.

While hard disks and home networking are overhauling the way music is distributed, multi-room video is undergoing a sea change as well. Distributed video is more challenging because the data files are much larger and require a fatter pipeline, but broadband networking is making it possible.

The first step in state-of-the-art distributed video is digital storage--again the hard drive. ReplayTV and TiVo began the movement to replace the VCR as a TV time-shifting device with hard disk recorders that allow you to schedule a recording with a simple click on a program guide and then to watch and delete programs without having to rewind or find a blank spot on a tape. Pausing live TV is another major benefit of these memory-equipped boxes that store programming even while recording. If the phone tings during The Sopranos, you can pause the program, take the call, press play, and pick up where you left off.