Countercurrent 1982

Chapter 1286 MP3
Duan Yun has always been interested in Japanese game consoles. The red and white consoles in his childhood carried too many childhood memories, so when passing by the Japanese exhibition area, he always stopped to watch them from time to time.

In addition, Tetris was born in 1988. This seemingly simple game quickly became popular all over the world. At this exhibition, many Japanese game console manufacturers also focused on launching this game.

After coming to the European exhibition hall, Duan Yun's focus is mainly on the communication field. Compared with the dominance of the United States in the field of home PC computers and Japan's position in the field of electronic products such as game consoles, European communication technology is also impressive. People admire.

When passing by the booth of an independent company, Duan Yun saw that the booth was a little crude, with only one computer and two power amplifiers, a symphony was playing in the stereo, and on the booth, there were design instructions for their software products .

After Duan Yun saw the design instructions of this software, his eyes froze immediately.

It turns out that this set of software is not an ordinary audio software, but the prototype of the famous MP3 software.

MP3 is an encoding mode that originated in the Eu 1987 digital transmission plan of a German company in 147.

MP3是利用音频压缩技术，将声音用1:10甚至1:12的压缩率压缩成容量较小的文件，可以保持较好的音质。

It is precisely because MP3 can maintain a relatively perfect sound quality while maintaining the maximum compression ratio, so MP3 quickly became popular, and its momentum far surpassed other encodings.

The basic working principle of MP3 is to discard the data part of the pcm modulation data that has little effect on human hearing, and use the psychoacoustic principle to adjust and discard part of the data. This process is similar to the process of zpez compressing pictures. They are all compressed intuitively. The part that is not easy to perceive, thus greatly reducing the data size.

Originally, Duan Yun thought that MP3 only appeared in the middle and late 90s, but now it seems that this audio coding format is much earlier than he imagined.

Reminiscent of the flash memory chips currently produced by his own chip factory, Duan Yun quickly thought of an epoch-making product, that is the MP3 player.

The music carriers widely used in the world today are tapes and CDs, but both of these carriers have a problem, that is, they are relatively large and easy to damage, but if digitally encoded MP3 players are used, the situation Only completely different, MP3 players are very small, even much smaller than the Walkman, it can store more songs, and the sound quality is clearer and smoother.

It is precisely because of this that the emergence of MP3 in later generations has brought a disastrous impact on the record industry, because this audio software is small in size and easy to transmit. In the domestic environment where copyright is already very weak, the number of people who buy tapes and CDs has decreased significantly. Previous music consumers have all become online MP3 downloaders. This situation not only exists in China, but also in foreign countries. , Looking at the 50 best-selling records in the history of American records, almost all of them were born in the 80s. At that time, CDs were booming, such as Michael Jackson, such as the Eagles.

It can be said that the MP3 player is an epoch-making product.

However, the world's first MP1 player was invented by Koreans in 3. Before that, the production of MP1998 players faced hardware difficulties, the most important being the problem of flash memory chips.

For example, after digitizing a CD, the file is about 1M data per minute, and a 10-minute CD will get about 70M data files. When the Internet is not developed, it will cost a lot to transmit these data. Very vigorous.

而MP3以10:1的比例将700M压缩为70M，将一首大约5分钟的歌曲压缩到4~5M，这时音乐能够很快就随着互联网拓展而流行。

The flash memory chip currently produced by Duanyun Chip Factory has a storage capacity of 512K, while the NADA flash memory chip under design has a capacity of 1M. Such a small capacity can only hold a few seconds of audio files, but if these audio data are in MP3 If the format is stored, the playback time can reach tens of seconds.

But even so, such a storage capacity is still not enough to make an MP3 player, because even a complete song cannot be stored in tens of seconds, and if the market accepts this new product, it needs to be able to store at least a dozen or so songs. More than [-] songs, that is, the storage capacity of a CD.

If you want to make up for the insufficient storage capacity of the chip, Duan Yun can make his own flash memory chip into a solid-state drive, that is, SSD, but in this case the volume will become larger. In the era when the Internet is not developed, compared with Walkman products, and Not many obvious advantages.

而且目前展台上展示的这种 MPEG-1是MP3软件的初代版本，压缩比通常为4:1，到了第2代的MP2也只有6:1~7:1的压缩比例，想达到MP3的1/10，还需要对这种软件进行进一步的优化。

所以段云如果真的想做出 MP3播放器，首先要解决的问题就是芯片的储存量，至少要达到50~70MB的存储量才够，其次是MP3的音频文件压缩比率必须达到1:10。

If Duan Yun wants to break through the performance bottlenecks in these two aspects, he must first make a flash memory chip or SSD with more than 50M, and a small solid-state drive needs at least two to four flash memory chips, which means that Duan Yun must It is necessary to develop and produce flash memory chips with a capacity of 4MB to 16MB.

However, in fact, it was not until 1993 that Intel launched 16MB and 32MB NOR Flash. It was very difficult for Duan Yun to achieve cornering overtaking within 5 years.

In addition, the MP3 software also needs further development and upgrading, and finally achieves a compression effect of 10:1.

Therefore, it is unrealistic to make an MP3 player at present. It needs a substantial breakthrough in both software and hardware. It will take at least 3 to 4 years for Duan Yun to actually produce this kind of product.

But the commercial value of this product is beyond doubt.

In 2001, Apple's first-generation iPod caused a sensation when it was launched, because it not only has a beautiful appearance, but also has a unique user-friendly operation method and a huge capacity.

At that time, this MP399 player, which was priced at US$3, sold 125000 units in the first two months of its sale. Since then, he has eaten 3% of the cake in the world's MP70 market and has become a myth of Apple.

And if Duan Yun can launch this product in advance, it will be an epoch-making start for it and Tianyin Electronics Factory. A product was developed...

(End of this chapter)