She looked up at me, smiled and shrugged, as if to say “Yeah, so?”

I’d just asked my five year old daughter to take a listen to some new speakers I’d installed. It was a 2.1 stereo system with subwoofer and integrated amplifier, all for less than $80 delivered. The reviews on Amazon offered a lot of praise about the sound quality despite the low price. Once hooked up I was surprised how good they sounded on a reference audio source. Especially for their diminutive size and low price. At that moment my daughter had bounced into the room and I wanted to share the experience of being so pleasantly surprised by a new product. And that was where things went off the rails.

As the impressive sound flowed around us and she stared blankly back at me, I realized “She doesn’t even know what bad audio sounds like. To her, great sounding audio is just audio.” Kids under a certain age simply don’t experience crappy sound often, or perhaps at all. To them, audio reproduction is either ‘great’ or ‘broken’, there is no middle-ground of ‘everyday bad sound’. When I was a teenager, bad audio was pretty much the expected default. Most places we went generally had lousy audio, except perhaps a concert, a theater or an audiophile’s house. The bad sound wasn’t just from terrible speaker design, it was also from substandard materials, poor placement and abysmal audio sources. Whether it was the snap, crackle, pop of an LP on my dad’s $500 turntable, the smeary, muddled sonic mess created by an audio cassette, or the incessant background hum on my cousin’s vintage dashboard 8 track player, it just sounded bad. But it was the kind of bad we were used to.

I did a quick mental rundown of the persistent audio sources in my daughter’s life. She watches a little bit of TV in the living room which has a 5.1 Dolby Digital sound system. Our home theater has a THX certified 7.1 system. The sound systems in our cars are standard manufacturer equipment, which these days sound quite good. She even has a pair of Bose noise cancelling headphones for her iPad. The sources feeding into these systems are all at least 44.1 Khz, 16-bit digital recordings compressed with recent generation codecs. Kids these days simply have no experience with how bad a fuzzily modulated sound source over-driving cheap speakers can sound. Yes, I just said “Kids these days” but I’m not devolving into a rant of “In MY day we used to have to…” It’s actually a nice reminder just how far the march of progress has carried us in an area we don’t think about as much as ‘modern wonders’ like computers and mobile phones.

Even setting aside the impact of digitization of sound sources, over the past couple decades the typical quality of sound reproduction per dollar has scaled up dramatically. Although sound design used to be largely a black art, the knowledge of how to engineer low-cost speakers and amplifiers at high quality has become ubiquitous. The cost of components and materials has fallen to the point that even ‘cheap’ gear sounds remarkably good and ‘cost effective’ gear can sound amazing. There’s little additional value in paying top dollar for audiophile-grade equipment. The improvement over well-chosen mainstream gear is negligible. Audio purists used to pay $1,000 and up per speaker. Today, entire 7.1 speaker systems with outstanding quality cost less than $1,000 total. And that’s pretty awesome.

By popular demand, here is the Table of Strategic Elements slide from my keynote at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam. You can subscribe to updates of this table and other posts in the sidebar. If you remix this table with new categories or layouts, I’d enjoy seeing it.

Table of Strategic Elements

Ever wonder why Amazon can’t offer a cheaper bundle including print, audio & e-book versions? Is it accountants vs. book lovers? Amazon is good at figuring out what we want before we even know it. That’s why I like the company. So it stands out when they miss an opportunity. I buy a lot of books from Amazon. I also buy audiobooks from their Audible division which I listen to while driving. Sometimes I’m torn between buying the printed version of the book, an e-book or an audiobook. They are all ideally suited for different things. When actually reading, I prefer a printed book if it’s a title I think I’ll want to keep, refer to or possibly loan out. If it’s typical Tom Clancy long-flight fodder, then I prefer it as an e-book since longevity, shelveability and loanability are trumped by portability. If I have some drive time coming up, I’ll want to go for the audiobook.

But what if I have a book like Matt Ridley’s excellent Rational Optimist sitting in my Amazon shopping cart? This is a book I’ll definitely want to shelve, refer to and loan out. If I’ve got a two hour drive tomorrow and a cross country flight the next day, I’m confronted with a lousy choice. It seems wasteful to pay full price for the same book three times over. Yet I’d be happy to pay something more to have e-book portability, print book longevity and audiobook convenience. This is a perfect opportunity for Amazon to up sell me. There are upsides for Amazon beyond more revenue. Since I have the electronic copy available immediately as a download, I don’t care if they save money by shipping the printed copy to me slow-boat, instead of second-day. Since I’ll have the printed copy for long-term reference I don’t care if they restrict the digital copy to not be transferable to other devices. This would also open opportunities to implement cross-platform features further solidifying Amazon’s position, such as the ability to pause the audiobook when I drive up to the hotel and have the e-book open up to the correct page later that night in my hotel room. Continue reading »