I found this interesting. A lot of it is stuff we've been saying for a while, but still worth a read I think.

Ok, thanks. Because of that link, I remembered several things I wanted to look for, and spent 4 hours doing that. Gotta love the web.

It is a really interesting article though.

Of course the music section on pricing missed the point that most online music download is still only 128Kbit (ie - crappy and only good for mobile mp3players) and nowhere near CD quality.

It's not clear that anybody particularly cares about CD quality any more. Certainly, the market for DVD-Audio and SACD has essentially gone nowhere. There's typically a huge selection of DVD music videos, but the lack of hi-def audio titles tells you something about the preferences of the market. Furthermore, look at the ever-loudening trend in recent CD releases. The "quality" of CD quality seems to be dropping every year.

As far as SACD and DVD-Audio go, there are many hurdles that are more significant than customers wanting higher-quality sound.

First, most people still have, at most, a CD player in their cars. Most people probably consider this when buying music, as much of their music listening time is probably in-car. So that puts DVDA out of the running right away. Some SACDs also have CD data written on them so that they can be read by regular CD players. But then you have to consider the fact that such a disc is significantly pricier than the same title on regular CD. And these people have no interest in buying a new player for home, either, especially one that's going to cose several hundred dollars.

Second, where are these high-quality masters coming from? I could be wrong, but I think that most music is mastered at qualities that don't read the level of what SACD is capable of. Of course, you could go back to pre-digital mastering, but then you've got a big noise floor in almost every case. That can be compensated for, but it takes a lot of effort and is going to only be applied to back catalog titles that are likely to sell well, and, honestly, I've already owned at least three copies of Dark Side of the Moon. That leaves new recordings, that the studio knows is going to sell well, and I've got zero copies of the latest Britney album and I want to keep it that way.

Third, the real advantage of these better formats isn't higher-fidelity recording, whose advantage is questionable, but super-binaural recording, which means 5.1 encoding on both of those formats, IIRC. Okay, that's not a hurdle, really, but it does mean that there's no advantage to mp3s, which are mono or stereo only. I suppose many of the arguments about mastering can be applied here, too, to a lesser extent.

In summary, CDs caught on not because of better fidelity, but because of convenience. You can't play records in a car, cassettes and 8-tracks are annoying to deal with because of the lack of and/or slowness of track searching. Notably, DATs were close to CDs in fidelity, but had the inconveniences of cassettes. Then again, MiniDiscs were also close to CDs in quality and had potentially better features and still failed. Of course, CDs had a good foothold by then. I suppose that this really ends up confirming what you were saying. Sorry; I got distracted.

I have a feeling that in ten years time, we will be having this same discussion as to why HD-DVD or BluRay DVDs failed to replace the regular DVD.
Of course I am making the assumption that we will all still be chatting on this board at that time......

Oh, god. I hope not. (About the DVD thing, that is.)

Better video quality should be an easier sell than better audio quality, though.

Yeah. Elvis supposedly had one. But for all intents and purposes, you can't play records in a car.

The author briefly touches on a subject similar to what was recently brought up on these boards: a la carte cable programming . Obviously, other than my desire to save a couple of bucks, it would appeal to a large demographic of diverse tastes.

And like Larry mentioned, the article also brought to mind several things I wanted to search for online, which resulted my the discovery of the new Blockbuster Online program. While this seems like a decent competitive strategy against Netflix , what irks me about it is that they charge nearly half the cost of a Movie Pass. Up 'til now, I was willing to pay the extra charge (as opposed to Netflix) in order to have the convenience to in-store selection and pick-up. But considering that there are limited quantities in the store and the extra cost involved, I see no need to continue paying for the more expensive option. I would think that the cost of such a service would be parallel both online and off. In fact, I feel a bit throttled by Blockbuster's methods, which is enough to make anyone switch to the competition.