In a way, digital music has the potential to eventually give us the best quality sound of all. You'd never find something with the audio quality of HD ADTOE in a CD Jewelcase, I think!
Well, you are right about that, but not only did that version of the album become available long after the album itself came out, but those HD albums are quite pricey and you have to get it on that website. Plus which albums are available in that particular format, the selection is very limited.
Basically, what I'm saying is that talking about HD Audio files in FLAC format is kind of like talking about DVDs in mid-90's. Yes, it's there, and it's much better quality, but you can't get everything in that format. And certainly not on iTunes.
But the point that this particular discussion stemmed from was that the format does not reflect the music itself, and even this proves that yes it does. These HD FLAC files are doing far more than an MP3. But they also take up a lot more room, and even if your portable music player can play it, the amount of these songs that you could fit onto a single MP3 player is very limited, so either way, it's about making a decision and finding whatever balance works best for you. But even then, if you download HD FLAC or something from iTunes or whatever, unless you're computer savvy and have a decent audio converter, you're kind of stuck.
Whereas with a CD, any home computer can rip a CD and most if not all computers come with software that gives you the option to choose the file format and quality at which you want to rip your CD.
But the thing is, for the vast majority of people, iTunes is becoming the new standard for how they get their music, and iTunes in itself, downloading from it is a major step down from a CD quality wise. If they instead made Music DVDs or something, something that brought that HD Audio quality and introduced it as a new standard, I'd support that wholeheartedly. But as it is now, you can't listen to HD FLAC files in your car, or on your home theater system.
By cheap all I meant was poor quality. I sometimes end up playing music on internal speakers from my computer, I doubt I can distinguish a cd from something worse than 128 mp3 on those.
Well yeah. But I mean, the only time I actually listen to music on my internal speakers is if someone said, "Check out this song," and I just wanna get a gist of the song to see what it's like. I wouldn't sit there and try to enjoy music on my internal speakers.
