Can you imagine a world without vinyl?

Johnnantais wrote ... vinyl is making a comeback ...

What planet are you living on? While there are (and always have been) a number of people like us who belive in vinyl as the way to go (given the current alternatives) to suggest this might turn into some popular vinyl revival is ludicrious. The number of new issues on vinyl compared to CD is, has been for years and will continue to be almost unmeasurably small. (not to mention the fact that the quality of new issues compared to the 50's and 60's mostly stinks). Be content with the old vinyl you have and can find but don't nurture any delusions of vinyl suddenly returning to its former glory days.
Pray and agitate instead for the music companies to move beyond either vinyl or redbook CD to a better place which is technically feasible if only the economic rationale presented itself.

Zaike:

audiophilia may get a welcome kick in the pants from the availability for customers to choose just how high they'd like their rez.

That's my hope as well --
but the ONLY, tiny, indication of this actually being available one day seems to be the existence of improved live FM broadcast... i.e. the fact that a few people are actually making the effort today to provide "good sound" over the waves...

Gregm: I imagine a scenario when super high-speed connection bandwidth and device storage capacity have both become commodities, and we're no longer tied to limiting physical disk formats, then service and content providers will look to higher resolution as a low-cost way to add value in order for them to charge a premium. Kind of like gas stations offering high-octane gas at a higher price for drivers of high-performance cars. You can see this as a logical extension of the HE industry trend right now touting "high def" as a way of generating new revenues. In the future, music and video consumers could be offered the choice of downloading resolution-reduced content at one or two different price tiers (call 'em "regular" and "mid-grade"), or paying more and getting the full native master resolution of digitally-recorded content ("premium" or "ultra"). Compared with today, when iTunes customers are supposed to be happy with resolution that's not even CD-quality, the optional availability of higher than CD-quality resolution every time you choose to download or stream content should have the effect of raising public awareness about the high end (the "high performance cars" of my analogy). I think it's inevitable that the mainstream industry will eventually come around to the profitable possibilities inherent in promoting sound quality rather than trying to sweep it under the carpet, it's just a matter of tech advancement rendering capacity a non-issue from the provider-cost and consumer-convenience standpoints.

Zaike:

content providers will look to higher resolution as a low-cost way to add value in order for them to charge a premium

Could you spread the word a bit -- as in whisper into marketers' ears about where their next promotion and performance bonus may come from :)

That's probably the only way they'll jump on this bandwagon. Cheers

Gregm...I agree that a live feed sometimes has a certain quality which I have not heard from any recorded media. However, FM radio has some limitations. As you may know, FM radio consists of two signals, a mono one up to 19KHz and a multiplexed one, (Left minus Right) above 20 KHz. The two signals (mono and demultiplexed L-R) are mixed to get Left and Right.

Have you ever listened to the L-R signal by itself? Even with a strong RF signal the L-R signal is pretty bad, and this gets mixed with the mono signal to get stereo. It's a wonder that it sounds as good as it does. Of course as the RF signal gets weaker the L-R signal goes from bad to awful, and we switch our receivers to mono.

I know that you said "improved" FM. Fat chance. What you will get is digital, and here we go again with the debate!