Personal audio has come a long way in the last 40-50 years. With the advent of the solid state transistor in the 1950’s one might say that the expansion of personal audio products has been nothing short of spectacular.  In the 1960’s for instance personal audio was limited to those with higher incomes, especially if you wanted to record and manipulate your own music. The reel to reel tape recorder and the home receiver were the staples in many middle class households. Those types of home based systems were many thousands of dollars for advanced technologies that are archaic and even obsolete by today’s standards; however they represented the “personal audio” components of the day.
As a result of the high cost, most of the population was relegated to the transistor radio as their personal audio device. Then with a little time and research and development growth and technology within the audio (and video industries) assured that personal audio devices move very quickly up the public’s “wish list”.  In the 1970’s, with the general public becoming somewhat bored with the transistor radio and with other personal audio developments Sony introduced its “Walkman” personal audio player.  For the first time a person was able to carry their own audio files (in the form of “cassettes” which replaced the 8 track technology) and listen to their music at will. Soon, with the development of more and more technology the boom box was born. It gave one the ability to listen to their music, away from their devices at home without use of a “headphone” apparatus – a novel concept at the time.  With firms such as Sanyo and Awai doing their best to capture the personal audio market, other firms were being born to go after their place in audio history. Companies like Infinity and Koss were hot at work in the mid 1980’s going after the sound “quality” market. This market was selling itself on the integrity or crispness of the musical sound being produced thru the speaker or other output components of the system.
Enter the age of the current revolution with the minitureaization of circuitry of audio components. This miniturareization resulted in systems many times more powerful and with a corresponding reduction in space and weight of the player. Smaller, more compact and much more powerful systems were becoming the norm. With smaller hand held devices, additional “software” needed to be developed - enter the MP3 recording format. This type of format patented digital audio encoding by a company called “Moving Pictures “. The advantage of this technology at this time is that players were being less limited in how much music content the small apparatus could carry. MP3 players became a multi-billion worldwide business. Apple IPods became synonymous with the latest and greatest of personal audio devices. Their first entry into the market was with their IPod shuffle, Nano, IPod and onto peripheral items such as audio docs etc.
The personal audio selection has come a long way in both music storage and sound quality – pick up an MP3 player and find out for yourself…