2021 will be remembered, in the annals of music, as the first year of the new millennium in which all indicators, after years of crisis, revolutions, changes, innovations, abandonments and rebirths, have turned towards the best.
New audio devices: all the news
Above all, the front of listening technologies went better, basically improved everywhere, above all due to the increasing diffusion of Dolby Atmos, technologies such as X-Fi, or Spatial Audio, all aimed at offering not only a better listening quality but also a different experience, more similar to our natural predisposition to listening to sound sources placed in different places in space, than to simple binaural listening. In the battle for better listening, between Dolby and DTS, where DTS seemed to be able to prevail in terms of rendering and sound quality, Dolby definitely won and this 2021 has certified its dominance. Dolby Atmos is everywhere, in televisions and smartphones, consoles and set top boxes, and having raised the bar of possibilities, it has also pushed streaming platforms to move towards better sound quality, with HD, Lossless and many other solutions.
If until a few years ago the main trend for audio technologies was digitization and miniaturization, which therefore allowed increasingly smaller, portable, ubiquitous speakers, new technologies such as Apple’s Spatial Audio instead aim not to be everywhere but only in devices. ‘right’, those that really allow a better listening. It is obvious that wireless audio may not yet reach the top of quality, but it is interesting to see how many new devices released in 2021 have focused not on size, price and convenience, but on sound quality.
On the front of daily consumption, the increasing diffusion of smart speakers has pushed forward the use of voice assistants for music selection, and in this field the greater diffusion of artificial intelligence has also played an important role. All this has happened above all due to the boost that came from the consumption of music through streaming platforms, which have confirmed the central role they have taken for some time now. In many ways the case of the Måneskin, which in 2021 reached the top of global popularity in a few months, is the exact photograph of the new possibilities offered by platforms.
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