Growing up in the sixties, everyone’s favorite audio player was a transistor radio. Small, portable, you could carry it around and listen to a game or music. They really didn’t have talk radio back then. I carried one around all over the place listening to music or a baseball or football game. They weren’t as colorful and you couldn’t store anything on them; all you could do was listen to the radio.

Fast forward to the seventies, radios changed to eight track tapes for a lot of music. Large forbearers to the cassette, they loaded similarly into a radio in the car or Player and had several tracks of music. These were fairly clumsy and took up a lot of space to carry more than one of them. Toward the end of the seventies cassette tapes and players were designed. Smaller and more compact they played music, you could record onto them and replay them and they designed carriers to handle several at a time.

Fast forward again to the eighties, the radios got bigger, they called them “boom boxes”, and guys carried enormous radios on their shoulders walking around. They played very loud; they did have the option to play a radio or a cassette tape. Some could record from the radio onto the cassette tape or dub from one tape to another. Then Sony and others designed a “compact disc” or CD. Music could be burned onto a CD and carried in a portable player or played in a larger tabletop model.

During the nineties the CD revolution expanded to include music, computer software, books on CD and other items copied onto the CD. In 1987, the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute Integrierte Schaltungen research center was working on MP3 technology. In 1991 it almost died, but in 1998 they began enforcing patents and in 1999 the first MP3 players were on the market.

Fast forward to today. According to
PCmagazine.com
, these are the top rated.

• Samsung YP-U3
• Sansa Express
• Apple iPod nano (8GB)
• Apple iPod (80GB)
• Creative Zen MicroPhoto

In today’s market, you can download music, videos, books on MP3, old radio programs, plus a myriad of other things. There are many different brands; some with flash drives, some with HD. Some hold a battery charge a lot longer than others. The point is audio from the sixties to now has made tremendous strides in programming and engineering.

The question is what’s next? Who knows, but with all the capabilities it has today in tomorrow’s market all it can do is get better.