fi
Amelia Gentleman
Music lovers could soon be free to dispense with cumbersome multi- stacking CD players in favour of pocket-sized devices smaller than credit cards, christened the My-fi.
Promoted as the world’s smallest hi-fi, the British-designed machine can play music downloaded from a CD player or direct from the Internet. The music is stored on a minute memory card inside the unit.
Design companies Priestman Goode and the Cambridge Design Partnership hope to market the product to “serious audiophiles”.
“There are no moving parts so it’s very light and it won’t skip or jump tracks – this will be high-quality music for those who are out and about,” says Mike Beadman, director of the Cambridge Design Partnership.
Complete with earphones, the player is expected to appeal to people who like to combine running with listening to music.
The two companies are seeking a manufacturer to support the development and marketing of the prototype.
But the machine will not come cheap: it is likely to cost about 300. The memory cards, which can store about an hour’s worth of music, cost approximately 100.
“The technology is coming down in price daily. You can re-record as many times as you want, so users could buy two cards and record their chosen CDs whenever they want to listen to them. It only takes a few seconds to record a whole CD,” Beadman says.
The player can run on a battery for two hours and it has a screen that displays the name of the artist, album and track. Its creators also boast a digital equaliser and audio compressor which can customise the sound reproduction to suit the listener.
However, record companies warn that this kind of innovation has alarming implications for the music business. Internet users are able to access a variety of albums from unlicensed sites on the Web.
Neil Cartwright, a Sony Internet representative, said: “This is extremely worrying, because people can download CDs from the Internet free and there’s nothing to protect the artists or the copyright holders.”
But says Beadman: “We do not condone copying from an unlicensed site, but there are some licensed sites and users will also be able to copy music from their own CD collection on to the memory cards.”