Compression was invented for FM radio in the 1960's so that it made small radios more impressive.It's called gating and uses a compander.
Errm...
not quite.
Mp3's were invented for getting music down a telephone line with an analogue 56k modem.
Back in '93, you could buy very fancy 19200 kbps modems (with standards only covering 14400 max). It would be a while until 28.8 came along.
Multimedia was all the rage. Moving postage stamps, yay.
Perceptual coding dates back further than that though. The venerable MUSICAM (MP2) codec has been out since '87 or so (that's the poor maligned codec used for DAB at questionable bit rates - basically it needs 160/192 kbit/s upwards for decent quality, as an internal storage format it's typically used with 256..384 kbit/s at broadcasters).
It is also important to distinguish between
dynamic range compression,
data compression and
data reduction (perceptual coding).
My old cassettes played on a 20 year old Sony pro walkman anihilates my mp3's players even with lossless FLAC and high bitrate formats for sheer sound quality.
No effin' way.[tm]
Or at least you have the wrong kind of MP3 player or a problematic kind of hearing damage. My modest Sansa Clip (a model on the inexpensive side of things) has very low hiss levels and no other noises even with very sensitive in-ears (something that vintage portable audio gear never managed to pull off here), still goes comfortably loud enough with 600 ohm headphone antiques, subjectively sounds perfectly fine and conveniently stores the relevant part of my music collection in medium-bitrate VBR MP3 (which I have been unable to ABX vs. lossless in a quiet environment at home). Battery life is only average but still at least on par with what you'd get out of a portable tape player with two AAs, and all that out of a very small (almost too small) device. It's no contest. Only the non-replaceable battery is something I'm not entirely comfortable with.
Most 20 year old portable tape players, by contrast, are likely to have their share of dead surface mount electronics and associated problems (Sony and Aiwa in particular), wobbly belts or cracked gears (the infamous Sony direct drive mechanism). Then the very limited capacity. Rewinding. Real-time dubbing. No thanks.
Interestingly enough, portable
radio technology has not advanced as much, at least if you demand a certain performance level. The Clip's radio part is stone deaf. That's why I always lug around a "real" radio which is comparatively huge and whose receiver section could have been designed in the same way with the same ICs in the early 1990s.
Most electronics are not even designed to be repaired; they don't even carry spares and if you can and want to mend it;it's cheaper to buy a new one.This can't go on.
That's one point I'd have to agree with. Today you might find that even a moderately expensive consumer electronics device of the more complex kind (like a TV) cannot be repaired after only 3 years due to unavailability of spares. It can't stay like that forever though.
On the subject of hoarding, here's what your truly has accumulated in the past (maybe I already posted that?):
* computer parts
* portable radios with shortwave coverage
* music
* keyboards (obviously)
Usually at some point the "usefulness per additional item" index approaches near zero, which means it may be time to move on to something else. Only music has been an exception (in the long term it's a little heavy on the bank account though).
