Originally Posted By: Dr.House

This was true for the last 20 years but this trend of compressed audio and formats such as MP3 is slowly dying. The shift has already occured with manufacturers. There is a shift happening in consumer preferences as well to lossless formats. Economies of scale and dropping prices in storage devices (HDD, Micro-SD cards, SD etc) as well as affordable and quality music players, computers, home theatre PC's is definitely encouraging. Lossless audio formats are a basic feature set on portable players costing less than $40. Now that manufacturers are marketing these features instead of MP3, consumers are now becoming educated on the benefits. This will all lead to a shift to lossless as the standard and in tastes. Affordability is key, and it is already present in the market. It will just better.

If this takes hold, production/mixing will most likely shift as well. It did at least hold true during the "loudness/mp3 wars". Believe it or not vinyl is actually starting to come back in a big way as well.


It will be interesting to see if what you suggest happens. I work with a lot of tech savvy people and not one of them knows or understands anything about “lossless” audio. I think the manufactures need to do a whole lot of educating before mp3 gets unseated in the eyes of the masses. I was a big lossless fan until I started doing extensive tests of 320 mp3 and found that except on my Sennheiser HD600s at all volumes or my M80s turned up loud can I even sometimes hear the difference. If lossless does take hold back from mp3 I think it’s going to be more because of peoples egos and having bragging rights than from actual sound quality.

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