| Personally, I don 't worry about the whole mp3 quality reduction thing. It may be a challenge for the record companies to figure out how to make money. Nevertheless, I don't think it's a long-term issue for quality recording. Consumers will always choose convenience over quality. However, if they can get better quality with the same level of convenience, they'll undoubtedly go for it. When internet bandwidth and iPod capacity increase to the point where you can download music at CD quality or better just as fast as an mp3 and still hold the same number of songs, that will be the norm. And those days are very near.
I don't know what the future of surround is. But getting high quality audio back into the ears of consumers will just come naturally with increasing connection speeds and portable storage capacity.
Thomas |