"Boss, we did it!"
Cheers and shouts came from the phone, along with the cheers of countless researchers. Hearing this, Chen Dong excitedly hung up the phone.
Subsequently, accompanied by a researcher, Chen Dong quickly arrived at the MP3 lab.
"Boss, this is it." An engineer in a white coat handed the MP3 player to Chen Dong.
Chen Dong looked at the MP3 player in his hand and started playing with it. The MP3 player was quite large, somewhat like the popular "brick" mobile phones of today, only smaller. It could be held in one hand or put into a pants pocket.
The MP3 player has a total of seven buttons: power button, volume up/down buttons, confirmation button, back button, and up/down buttons.
Chen Dong turned on the MP3 player, and the screen lit up instantly, displaying a very simple interface with the words "Music Catalog" on the main page. He pressed the confirmation button, and a catalog of several songs appeared immediately. He could use the up and down arrow keys to switch between songs in the catalog and select a track. After pressing the confirmation button again, the screen entered the playback interface, and melodious music began to play from the speakers.
"Sweet, sweet your smile, like flowers in the spring breeze..."
The engineer smiled and said, "Boss, this MP3 player uses a built-in speaker and also supports headphones. You see, there's a headphone jack at the bottom of the MP3 player. When you plug in your headphones, the music will play through them."
Chen Dong tried it out. With the headphones on, the sound quality was noticeably better than the external speakers. Ordinary people would hardly be able to tell the difference. It was similar to music played from a cassette tape, but with the headphones on, it sounded like music played from a CD. In other words, it was a level above.
"How long does the MP3 player last?" Chen Dong asked, placing the MP3 player on the table.
"The headphones can play music for about 5 hours, while the speakers can play music for about 3 hours," the engineer replied.
"Not bad." Chen Dong nodded. In the current market, a pair of batteries can last for about two hours. Once the batteries are about to run out, the sound quality will change and make a rattling noise.
However, if the battery life is increased to five hours, it is significantly better than a Walkman.
Of course, MP3 players and portable music players are driven in different ways; one reads memory cards, while the other drives tapes, and their power consumption differs by a factor of two.
"What is the cost of manufacturing it? If we operate at full capacity, what output can we achieve?"
No matter how good a product is, it's useless if it can't be mass-produced. Similarly, if the price is too high, the market prospects will be greatly reduced.
However, Chen Dong was not worried about these things. MP3 players were a very mature product in another time and space. Both their production volume and price had been tested by the market, so there was no room for empty promises.
As expected.
The engineer immediately replied, "The cost of counterfeiting each MP3 player is about 200 RMB. The most expensive part is the memory chip inside. If mass production is required, it will take about a week to modify the production line. The existing portable music player production line can be modified and used. I estimate that each production line can reach 30,000 units per month when operating at full capacity."
Upon hearing this, Chen Dong frowned. Thirty thousand units was not too many, but too few.
In another timeline, although Samsung was the first to invent MP3, the company that truly popularized it and made it popular worldwide was a company from the United States.
The company, Diamond Entertainment, launched the Rio PMP300 in late 1998. It quickly became memorable because it allowed users to download MP3s from the internet for free, something unimaginable at the time. It brought immense joy and surprise to many, but problems soon followed.
That was a copyright protection issue. Soon, Diamond was targeted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a giant in the record industry, which sued the company for infringing on intellectual property rights.
Ultimately, Diamond Entertainment won the case, and the copyright dispute quickly spread throughout the world through the media. In an instant, this MP3 player became a well-known star product, and spread rapidly around the world at an incredible speed, becoming a legend in the MP3 industry.
As Chen Dong was thinking about these things, several managers nearby misunderstood his meaning.
Wang An frowned and said, "Boss, MP3 players are still a novelty. If we sell them in China, there will definitely be a lot of drawbacks. After all, the internet in China is still in its early stages. Only some universities and larger companies have installed internet access. I'm afraid it will be hard to find them on the market, let alone ordinary people."
This is indeed a problem. The reason why MP3 players have become popular all over the world is because they are free. The Internet is full of music, and most of these lossless music resources are actually controlled by record companies.
But let's not forget what era we live in: the internet knows no borders, which is one of the most widely circulated phrases on the internet.
Whether it's genuine software or pirated software, you can find them all on the internet.
In the late 1990s, a sudden internet cafe boom swept through cities large and small across China, and those who opened the earliest internet cafes naturally made a fortune. At that time, most computer operating systems were pirated CDs that circulated from obscure corners of the world.
Because a genuine operating system disc costs thousands of RMB, not only small internet cafe owners, but many large enterprises also felt the pinch of paying for system installation. At that time, China was the country with the largest number of pirated operating systems, bar none.
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