March 2, 1997
The New York TimesTECHNOLOGY VIEW / By LAWRENCE B. JOHNSON
Devices That Do Everything Except Make Lives Simpler
Picture, in one unit, computer, TV, telephone, fax, pager, VCR and game center. Now imagine relaxing with it at the end of the day.
As we plunge toward the 21st century, the consumer electronics industry finds itself in a precarious, even baffling, position, not unlike that of Western art music in the early years of the 20th century.
Then, the cutting edge of musical esthetics, embodied in Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone Serialism, appeared to sever the very strands of historical continuity. Suddenly, what was new no longer represented a recognizable permutation of what had gone before. It was as if the river of music history, with its clarifying context, had been dammed up. Perspective was lost and, with it, comprehension.
That is pretty much the picture facing home entertainment today. Its continuity is threatened by the new possibilities of technology, a new order of consumer interests and a desperate lack of context for bringing clarity and meaning to a plethora of options.
Sobering auguries can be read in two new products that bespeak critically different viewpoints on these changing times.
Consider, for openers, a powerful surround-sound receiver from Denon, the AVR-5600. It may be the best example of the venerable receiver in its most modern incarnation. To tradition's manner born, it carries the confluence of audio and video to a new crest of integration and convenience.
Denon's receiver, able to do so many things and make them all so easy to accomplish, offers a stunningly practical example of a concept newly touted -- as if newly coined -- by computer and television manufacturers: convergence. But what one finds converged here are familiar themes of home entertainment, or at least variations on familiar themes.
The Denon AVR-5600 can fairly be called a high-water mark. But in the predawn of the new century, as a completely new strain of convergence rushes toward us, this all-embracing receiver might more accurately be seen as a watershed. For it does not, on second thought, embrace all; not by a long shot. Home entertainment has grown into something much larger and more complex than can ever again be contained within or controlled by a single box.
Consider next the brave new order: Toshiba's imminent "convergence" apparatus, the Infinia 7220, is a supercharged computer, television, telephone, fax machine, pager, digital video disk player and surround-sound movie and game center, all in one breathtaking package. The rounded lines and dark charcoal finish of the processor and video monitor inspire awe, a recognition of limitless power, near invincibility. This is what it must be like to slide into the cockpit of the F-117A Stealth fighter.
And for most consumers, turning on the "instrument panel" of either of these highfliers would have the same effect: cerebral meltdown.
The Infinia is seriously complicated. It offers level upon level of entertaining -- indeed, dazzling -- functions. But after the first flush of amazement, and apart from the occasional demonstration for one's relatives or friends, how much of this wonderful versatility might one ever use, or even learn to use?
Consumers need simple devices. The VCR clock proved that. Marketing analysts concede that even though people feel they are getting added value in a television that offers a picture within a picture, most folks don't use the feature after the first week or two. And who ever bothers programming a CD player to play only selected tracks in a certain order?
At the end of a long day, one wants to be able to turn on the television or the CD player, settle back and be entertained. That's human nature. And that was consumer electronics before the watershed.Home entertainment, like the rest of our lives, has evolved to a very complex state. Today, we are told, the sky really is the limit; one really can buckle oneself into the seat of an F-117A and zoom into the amusement clouds.
Well, not exactly.
Quite apart from the matter of complexity, not even so superbly executed a device as Toshiba's Infinia 7220 stands comparison with the dread Stealth on one crucial point: system integration -- purpose, if you like.
And that is the rub for the entire new order. In its determination to create a new species of consumer electronics that brings an expanding universe of possibilities to one's fingertips, a groping industry eagerly confuses all purpose with no purpose.
So confusion reigns in the consumer electronics industry. Digital technology, while raising the standard of what one can experience at home, has muddied a picture that was once clear, turned the simple issues of audio and video entertainment into a boggling mosaic of interactions, alternatives and potentials.
Now, the exponential mutations that have long tugged and torn at the computer marketplace beset a converged world of home entertainment. At least consumers have the ultimate option of standing pat and waiting for the waters to calm again. The real crisis of careening technology lies in the laps of its purveyors.
What is it they are selling, anyway? If you box three disparate gizmos together and call it something new and exciting, will consumers fall for it? Yet, if the electronics moguls are puzzled by their own ill-defined new products, they can see one thing clearly. Awaiting a brand-new category of goods is a market with zero penetration. Everybody is a potential customer.
Perhaps we've reached a point where keeping the options simple is just too great an engineering feat. Then again, the route of complexity gives no sign of leading out of the current dolorous market to the promised land of flush sales.
Crazy times, these. It's enough to make you want to shut off the computer and settle in front of the stereo for a few minutes of sanity. Maybe listen to a bit of Schoenberg.