OTHER TECH

Hard-Disk Recording Hard drives broke free of PCs to forever change home entertainment By Michael Antonoff Photo by Tony Cordoza If S&V had forecast five years ago that we'd soon be sliding entire music collections into our shirt pockets or watching more commercials at the movies than on our TV sets, you'd have called us crazy. But in just half a decade, spinning magnetic platters that were once confined to computers have created whole new categories of A/V components, and brand names like iPod and TiVo have become household words.

My interviews with the first users of video hard-disk recorders for "Tapeless VCRs" (May 1999) made it clear that the passive way we'd watched TV for 50 years was passé. These new recorders let you pause live broadcasts and skip commercials, making it possible to watch 60 Minutes in 45 (a phrase repeated by a TiVo owner to a defensive Mike Wallace a couple of years later). S&V's debut year featured our first reviews of both ReplayTV (July/ August) and TiVo (September).

The audio hard-disk server was born in 2000. "It's not every day that a first-of-a-kind product comes along," I said in my report on the ReQuest Multimedia ARQ1 (July/ August). The familiar act of finding a CD and loading it into the player, then taking it out and putting it away when you're done, just to go through the same drill every time you want to hear it, suddenly seemed as efficient as using a crank to start your car. Once a CD was ripped to the hard drive, all you had to do to play it was simply point the remote at the server or your TV screen, and the same could hold true for every song in your collection.

Meanwhile, portable servers were making their way onto belt clips. The coming showdown between flash-memory and hard-drive players was first highlighted in David Ranada's "Two Paths to MP3: RCA's Lyra and Remote Solution's Personal Jukebox" (February/March 2000). With my review of Creative Labs' Nomad Jukebox (December), the advantages of hard-disk storage over flash memory became clear. Hard drives offered storage at pennies per megabyte (MB) instead of flash memory's dollars. (The prices for both types of memory have since plummeted, but the relative gap between them remains about the same.) This added up to hundreds of hours of music in a portable jukebox vs. an hour or two in a flash player.

The only way flash players could compete with the breakthrough size, usability, and snazzy design of Apple's hard-drive iPod ("Multimedia Maven," February/ March 2002) was by shrinking in size. That usually meant eliminating the memory-card slot and relying on embedded memory. There used to be five flash-card formats competing for your pocket tunes, but most cards are now used for digital photography.

Computers with built-in TV tuners and hard-drive recorders appeared in 2002, with Sony's Vaio MX PC (reviewed in "The Cutting Edge," April) setting the stage for remote-controlled PCs that also act as audio jukeboxes. The trend has since spread into offerings by about 40 computer makers. Microsoft, meanwhile, introduced the Xbox, the first gaming console with a hard drive ("The Cutting Edge," May).

By the end of 2002, hard drives were popping up in all kinds of A/V gear. Our Reviewer's Choice Awards for that year represent a kind of coming-out party for the hard drive, with six of the 20 winners sporting one.

The hard-drive hoopla provoked broadcasters to become hostile toward their newly empowered viewers. And SonicBlue, which owned ReplayTV from 2001 to 2003, drew most of their wrath. Maybe I struck a nerve when I said in my Reviewer's Choice Awards writeup, "as the set-top recorder that automatically leapfrogs commercials, the ReplayTV 4000 gives you the most precious gift of all: up to 20 minutes back in every hour."

A lawsuit by the networks and studios forced SonicBlue to sell ReplayTV, and its new owner, D&M Holdings, dropped the Commercial Advance feature that had so charmed users. You now have to reach for the remote and repeatedly press the 30-second Quick Skip button - a huge leap backwards in convenience.

Still, if the future of video hard-disk recorders is in doubt, don't tell that to the satellite and cable companies. There are more of these recorders inside EchoStar's Dish Network receivers and DirecTV's TiVo receivers than anywhere else. And cable companies are rolling out set-top boxes with hard drives that let you pause and fast forward through shows and schedule recordings as easily as you change the channel.

The fastest-growing market for hard-disk drives isn't computers but home-entertainment devices like video recorders, game consoles, and audio servers. The number of drives shipped in entertainment products is expected to more than triple over the next three years.

The impact of hard drives couldn't be more dramatic. With servers handling music playback at home and portable players giving you tunes on the go, the CD has become mainly useful as a source of new music. And "prime time" is anachronistic when you can rely on your hard disk's program guide rather than accept an 8 p.m. invitation from an ever more desperate network executive. It took five years, but the revolutions of hard drives are no longer judged in spins per second alone.