Music lovers remember a familiar advertising image from the past: a man reclined in a chair, head back, blown away by music from his high-fidelity sound system.
Like the Marlboro Man before him, Maxell’s pitchman is now a relic.
With their ability to store vast libraries of music in your pocket, sleek digital music players have replaced bulky home stereo systems as the music gear of choice. But the sound quality of the digital audio files they play is noticeably inferior to that of compact discs and even vinyl.
Are these the final days of hi-fi sound? Judging by the 2 billion songs downloaded from Apple Inc.’s iTunes service, the ubiquity of white iPod “ear buds,” and the hundreds of thousands of folks file-sharing for free, the answer is yes.
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I don’t think this is true as there will always be purists/enthusiasts who use “retro” technology. Case in point as I am writing this I am jamming to my Panasonic “walkman”-yeah I know WM is a Sony TM–Shockwave cassette player loaded with a custom mix of my fave dance tunes…
This argument is severely flawed for the simple reason that people are downloading lower quality music for the sake of faster downloads and storing more music on their Ipod not because they like lower quality sound. In fact people keep trying to get higher and higher quality albums ever since Bittorrent released. With Napster most mp3’s were 128kps and now they on Bittorrent it averages 320kps. As the average storage on a mp3 players increase in conjunction in the increase speeds of bandwidth music stores will start to offer higher and higher quality material till it eventually offers lossless formats.