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"For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options." <=> "I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now"

Your comment does not disagree with GP's in the way you think it does

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I guess what I'm saying is 27 different media players duct taped together does not seem like the peak of engineering. A single wireless protocol seems pretty good.

Back in the day, we'd rate ourselves by how many dongles we'd string together to get things to work.

Some time after the Thunderbolt 3 MacBooks were released I had to get data off of a FireWire 400 drive. Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800, FireWire 800 to FireWire 400. Everything mounted up just fine.

That's pretty impressive. The closest to that I personally dealt with was back in the days of Mac Quadras and the ADB port where software was protected with dongles that would daisy chain via ADB.

In audio connectors, I've had some pretty crazy builds getting from various formats when the exact right thing isn't available but a giant milk crate of random cables was on hand.

A single protocol seems to be very limited, especially if your collection of music is purely physical, and for a lot of people it is

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