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It is ironic that I am writing about the decline and fall of the written word. The written word had a great run, starting perhaps as many as 6,000 years ago with Sumerian cuneiform. Writing has to compete today with more compelling and natural forms of human communication—audio and video—often served on the Internet.

Many people bemoan the decline of printed material. They equate the rise of the Internet, and inexpensive-to-produce video and audio, coming at the detriment of printed words, as a decline in civilization. You may be someone who holds this opinion.

It is easy to understand the sense of loss and disconnectedness caused by this technological shift. At its core, this attitude is elitist and reminiscent of the Luddites. This attitude ignores the democratic nature of the shift from printed to electronic communication. Time is limited. We elect to use our time in the way that makes the most sense to ourselves. Most people prefer to watch TV, listen to music, audio books or podcasts, or surf the Internet over reading a book, newspaper or magazine.

Writing and the written word is not natural. We must be schooled to read and write. It was the best disciplined, efficient way to communicate or archive information when alternatives were word-of-mouth, painting or smoke signals. The use of the written word exploded over the course of civilization because of this. Johannes Guttenberg’s invention of movable type printing accelerated the use of the printed word in Western culture and eventually worldwide. Public schooling further accelerated this trend.

Public schools, grades K-12, are conservative by nature. They are slow to change. They revel in the written word having had centuries to perfect their skills in teaching and assessing its use. Our teachers are written word experts. They are rarely expert in the creation and use of video and audio. Our children learn this from each other, from Hollywood, YouTube and other sites on the Internet. They have eclipsed the education system in their understanding and use of these newer technologies.

I find that listening to a well-narrated audio book trumps the written word. The narrator, often a professionally trained actor, brings the author’s words to life. The narrators often employ different voices for different characters. Non-fiction is also enhanced by having it spoken versus reading it yourself. Tables, charts and images are the only-missing piece.

I view audio and video is to the written word as oil painting is to drawing with pencil. These activities require training and discipline. The author, artist or director has to tell a story, communicate what is on their mind. The better the story telling, the more likely the audience will appreciate the effort. Mastering oil painting is more difficult than drawing. The painter often begins with a sketch but adds color, stroke, technique and dimension, as well as form and perspective. The same is true of audio and video. One begins with a script and then fills in the detail and enhances that script. Creating a good video requires many more skills than writing the script.

While schools may be slow to adopt technology many librarians understand and are changing. Librarians are evolving their missions from being keepers and lenders of printed material. Our local libraries, Westport and Wilton, Connecticut spring to mind, have become public facilities for all types of human communication. They have public computer terminals, lend audio books and videos, and host movies and seminars. They make online audio book borrowing available via the services of the Online Computer Library Center. If libraries are moving beyond the printed word, shouldn’t we all?

Why is Avatar one of the highest grossing movie of all time? I believe the use of high quality 3D special effects is the answer, not because of a compelling story and great acting. I don’t know firsthand because the Bow Tie Cinemas projector malfunctioned when I went to see it over the holidays. I got a refund instead of seeing the movie. [Update: Finally saw Avatar. Story is a rework of Custer's last stand with environmental consciousness overlaid.  3D is ho-hum. CGI fantastic!]

Movie theaters have long been a test bed for new technology. Wide screen video first graced movie theaters in the late 1920s, but fell into disuse in the depression. It was revived in the early 1950s to compete with TV. 3D was introduced about the same time. I remember watching a 3D horror film in the 1950s. I wore cardboard glasses with one red-tinted lens and the other green-tinted. The movie was awful. The 3D effect was not good. 3D movies disappeared shortly afterwards. Hollywood recently revived 3D, using newer technologies to provide people with a reason to go out to the movies. If you have a good home theater, why pay $10 or more to go the movies?

Sound systems in most movie theaters are far superior to home setups. Theaters have many high quality speakers. The surround system is tuned for the theater. Surround sound premiered in theaters and has slowly made its way into home setups. Stereo systems gave way to 5.1 systems. Some consumer electronics manufacturers have pushed 7.1 or 7.2 systems to sell more speakers and related equipment. But there is no 7.1 standard.

Most home setups are acoustic nightmares. The rooms are asymmetric with windows on one or more sides. The room may not have four walls and may be opened on one or two sides. Often the seating area is not centered in the space. The surround speakers are hard to wire because they need to be placed at seated ear level on the sides of the seating area. Running these speaker wires is difficult. Wireless speakers exist. They have issues and are not really wireless. They need to plug into nearby A/C power outlets.

Tuning a surround system used to be a time-consuming chore, requiring experts with special equipment. Fortunately, that is no longer the case, most new audio/video receivers come with an inexpensive microphone and built-in hardware that lets you tune the surround system in 10 minutes, without needing an expert. Audyssey is the company that makes that possible.

Tomlinson Holman is the chief scientist at Audyssey. He is also a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His name may be unfamiliar. He is the “TH” of THX. He was the first to refer to surround sound as “5.1″ because “5.055″ didn’t have marketing appeal. (The “0.1″ is for the low frequencies played on the sub-woofer.) He thinks the next step in audio is to 10.2 surround sound.

The 10.2 system adds two more front speakers, to the right of right and left of left. The system adds a rear center speaker. Two front speakers, near the ceiling, sit left and right, high above the plane of the others. The left sub-woofer serves low frequency sounds for the left side speakers and the right does the same for the right side. The high speakers allow a movie to produce the effect of sound moving up or down. Imagine the effect of a space shuttle launch with those speakers in place.

Wiring one of these setups would be worse than 5.1. The back of a receiver is cramped now with 6 sets of wires. But tuning this would be simple with new Audyssey chips. And once we get holographic image displays like in Star Wars… we will be entertained.

RealPlayer has a reputation for selling itself too hard and for making changes to a computer system without informed user consent. Real has reformed but the reputation continues. Apple’s iTunes, which installs QuickTime, Apple Updater, Bonjour and lots of other crapware without explicit user consent, seems immune to criticism.

The RealPlayer media player is an extremely useful tool. It has one feature that I find compelling – PerfectPlay. This feature allows you to buffer streaming audio, to pause and restart where you paused. You can set RealPlayer to cache up to 12 hours of an audio stream. When the phone rings or you need to temporarily leave the room you can pause the audio. When you return, you can restart the audio exactly where you paused.

Many people equate price with quality. Their mental equation must be something like, “higher price = better product.” I have been a skeptic about this equation for as long as I can remember.

A recent Consumerist.com post Do Coat Hangers Sound as Good as Monster Cables? highlighted how absurd this calculus is. An audiophile hooked up a blind test comparing Monster cables to straightened coat hangers used as speaker cables.

The audiophile subjects could not tell the difference.

Unbent clothes hangers performed just as well as expensive Monster products. If you scavenge your closet you will lose nothing in the sound reproduction but you will save a bundle of money.

Speaker wire transmits analog signals, so it may be possible that in some configurations upper end products matter in faithfully transmitting the signal.

Most video and audio signals transmitted between electronic components (not speakers) are digital signals. Either the bit, a 1 or 0, is decoded or it is not. This means that there is no benefit to you in paying for premium digital cables. Most retail outlets sell HDMI cables that cost a lot. Don’t fall for this. Digital cables do not have to be expensive.

Today, a 6-ft gold plated HDMI cable costs $8.37 at MonoPrice.com and a similar product at BestBuy.com costs $39.99.