I think MIDI represents a good example of what you can do if you compromise sensibly. I argued with folks over the 31.25K baud vs 38.4K (9600 x 4).
I also remember the assertion that it was going to "ruin" music because any 10 yr old could program a computer to play tempo perfect renditions of complex compositions, and yet to this day the accuracy of MIDI was always off putting.
One of my personal milestones was having a stack of instruments that were capable of 200 simultaneous voices without tape layering. That allowed the reproduction in real time of a symphony, but the biggest challenge was getting 200 separate MIDI streams running in parallel was a huge task. At one point I had 20 386 class PC's each capable of producing 10 streams. It was a silly goal since everyone else layered tracks but for me it was a weird quest to be a conductor of my own personal symphony orchestra :-)
I learned a lot about how time synchronization protocols can (and do) get screwed up in real time situations. That was fun.
For relatively little $$$, one can have hundreds of gigabytes of professional samples in VSTi plugins, and be able to render playback so good it would fool almost all listeners into thinking it was an actual, real, room miced recording.
I also remember the assertion that it was going to "ruin" music because any 10 yr old could program a computer to play tempo perfect renditions of complex compositions, and yet to this day the accuracy of MIDI was always off putting.
One of my personal milestones was having a stack of instruments that were capable of 200 simultaneous voices without tape layering. That allowed the reproduction in real time of a symphony, but the biggest challenge was getting 200 separate MIDI streams running in parallel was a huge task. At one point I had 20 386 class PC's each capable of producing 10 streams. It was a silly goal since everyone else layered tracks but for me it was a weird quest to be a conductor of my own personal symphony orchestra :-)
I learned a lot about how time synchronization protocols can (and do) get screwed up in real time situations. That was fun.