How is media consumed in your house?

I thought of this post because my son saw a radio on an episode of Tom And Jerry and didn’t know what it was. He asked about the talking box and I explained it was a radio. He then asked if radios talked (he always backs up the first question with a confirming secondary). This made me realize that he had actually not seen a physical radio in the house. You know that one dedicated piece of furniture with the sole purpose of filling a room with various melodies? We don’t own one and haven’t in some time.

I looked around the room to see what I did have in a/v equipment. I realized that not only did I not have a radio but I also had no CD player. I have many CD’s but I have ripped them to my computer for portability and access. Of course, I can still use a DVD player to play them which we do on occasion but if they get played its usually on a computer. The funny thing about the DVD player is that it is slowly being used less and less now. I watch a lot of media online and hook up the laptop to the television when more than one person is watching (my son and I like to watch Johnny Quest).

All this action go me thinking about how I consume my media. I remember an episode of “The Screen Savers” where Patrick was talking about music being produced for digital players and the loss of and taste for quality. The bottom line was that the quality of audio of new music recordings was much worse than previous years due to the PMPs as the intended channel of distribution. Once we get done compressing our music fro our PMP of choice and music studios now recording with the PMP as the intended device to be used, the music becomes degraded losing much of its dynamism. Now, I’m no audiophile but I have recognized the flatness of most recordings on my iPod versus the dynamism of a CD or better yet an LP (remember those?). What is most shocking to me is that I have really become accustomed to the less dynamic music and actually fully enjoy it even listening through my little mac book pro speakers. My son is really too young to know better either way but he certainly enjoys watching a good Pixar flick on my iPhone rather than watching on a big screen TV. As I’m typing this, he’s watching Scooby Doo on my iPhone.

So here’s how media (audio or video) is consumed in my household. I actually have a bunch of speakers connected to an amplifier, which receives its input from a airport express. I utilize the s-video on one laptop and the DVI on my mbp for viewing video on the big screen. Typically media is streamed off a central computer. Other than that, we all have our iPods with customized play lists to match each ones taste in music. I used to use a set of Boston Acoustic speakers I had for a computer to port music to the outside world (I just plugged them into an iPod) until last year when I just added some outdoor speakers to the mix.

So how have computers and PMPs changed your media consumption? What do you find you’re using the most?

Tags: digitalmedia, consumption,