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The "progress" is no surprise, but the thought of the constant stream of expenditures to replace what will no longer work, or no longer be "supported", or just to keep up with everyone else really isn't all that attractive! There is such a rush to get everything to market before it obsoletes or loses sales appeal nowadays that nothing works properly and everything is patched on top of patches and then all too soon has to be replaced entirely - long before "they" even get it right in the first place. I just hope those gimmicky free-air gestural controls understand emphatic one-fingered gestures when the control interfaces work as poorly as the mechanical ones do now to let the designers know what we think of the half-baked breakware and horrendously poorly thought-out controls they keep sticking us with.

I'm just glad I stuck with the still-best audio technology around for stability - my vinyl gear - while a constant revolving-door stream of that wonderful new digital stuff keeps coming and going through my listening room as it obsoletes every few months. Technology has become so terrific that the freshest breath of air is ironically what does not have to be replaced so darn often! That's what has become a really a novel pleasure anymore. Call me old if you like, but I yearn for the stability of those days when things didn't change so much. Dynamics are wonderful, but at near 120 dB, we will have as much as we can possibly need...to go deaf if that's sustained. Broke, too.

I like the idea of tech that removes redundant and unnecessary physical motions and other tedium. But I would prefer my music played as it is live. Somehow the idea of "immersive" sound seems like a gimmick - a distraction - unless the recording were engineered for that sound experience right from the start. Undoubtedly there will be wonderful recordings done for immersive listening, but for audiophiles who are still in stereo in 2014, the interesting thing will be partly how much the availability of great stereo recordings will diminish with time, partly how many tinkered and remixed versions of older recordings will appear that push the prior versions aside on the virtual shelves, and how many high-quality remasterings of great classic recordings won't get done due to prioritizing the 'new' sound. The second thing I mentioned is very important for persons who are exploring things that are new to them, and will have to wade through ever greater lists of junk to get to the better recordings. Stereophile may serve a greater purpose in the future, as an invaluable filter to help get people to those better recordings.

Changing technology is a mixed blessing. When digital audio came out, it sounded truly repulsive(see Bop Til You Drop). Now there are genuinely excellent digital recordings and reproduction systems. One of the primary reasons that digital recording improved(as opposed to digital reproduction), is that a few excellent, highly-skilled recording engineers(e.g. George Massenburg) said 'this sounds like crap, how can I make it better?'. The reason that these engineers were able to change digital recording, is because they new how great recordings sounded and they new how great recordings sounded because they had worked in environments where it was possible to record bands together and therefore they were able to hear how those bands sounded in a favorable acoustic environment.

Many of these crucial aspects of fine engineering are gone. There are few good sounding recording rooms left which has led to the audio industry producing much less top-end equipment. More importantly though, there are few(er) people working in recording who actually know what a band sounds like in a good room and crucially, how to capture the sound of a band in a good room. Music lives through the connection of musicians playing together in the same place at the same time. That's not to say that it's impossible to do it without that, just that it's harder.

I have found very few recordings in the last 20 years that sounded really good that were made by anyone who hadn't come up in recording studios when there were a good many of them still around. Where will the quality recording engineers of the future come from when they have no idea how to make things sound good?

Cheers,

Alan Tomlinson

...can't wait for ultra realistic, all immersive future performances that are BORING.  Too bad new music isn't evolving at the same rate as its recording and playback technologies. 

Maybe we expect less from new music than than we do from its delivery mode.  Do we really want to hear Bach, Miles, Frank and the Beatles etc. through yet another new and improved playback system?  And, each of these technical improvments often require the music to be repurchased in a new format at a higher price.  

These changes are driven by profit, technical and artistic imperatives/opportunities.  The last, but most important of these, is diminishing in importance.

In the distant past, only the wealthy and sophisticated heard the best music because it had to be heard live.  Artists strove to satisfy and impress the highest common denominator.  Once music could be recorded, more people had access to it.  And, once music became portable, everyone could hear it and reset market expectations.  Most artists try to deliver what will sell.  (They gotta eat and pay rent.)  

There's been plenty written about what sells today; they call it aural wallpaper.  ITM, I'll keep thrift store hunting for $1 vinyl and $2 CDs and supporting new artists who aim up.  

I think those dynamic range figures are largely theoretical, even in the cases where qualified by descriptors such as "pristine conditions." I also think those dynamic range figures are not including the limits imposed by ambient sound in the listening environment - I think they pertain (supposedly) only to the recording and playback chain itself.

And the ultimate, real world dynamic range capability of a given medium is far removed from how much of that capability actually gets used by a particular recording.

As others have mentioned, no one could think those early digitally recorded CDs sounded better than most of the even fairly well recorded and produced LP records. No one could think where the market has gone, in bulk, compressed, lossy digital files, offers better sound than Redbook CDs.

Reviewers talk about systems and content so good that they take the listener into the concert hall or into the studio...

Funny, but for me, the experience I prefer is one of binging the performance into my space.  When I sit down to listen to pre-recorded music,  I want it to clear, dynamic and musical. It is just fine for me that the sound blends with my own acoustic space.  While I look for improvements in clarity and dynamics in my system, I do not yearn for more spatial clues. It is just fine for me that the sound blends with my own acoustic space.  It is uncanny for me how well a good two channel setup does this.

I know the gamers and the videophiles will be pushing the industry towards total immersion.  Digital signal processing is amazing!  (price/performance)  I sure wish there will be similar advances in improving clarity of two-channel reproduction as well in both source material and reprduction equipment.

(And, as others have said, I wish that there was improvement in the dynamic flow encoded in the source material without such a big price premium...digital or analog..)

Moore's Law, doubling of computing power etc is all very nice ... and yet, in the last 15 years, the quality of music as consumed by most people has gone dramatically backwards --- not forwards. For most, it has got worse --- not better. Oh sure ... for the audiophile elite, we have hi-rez SACD and DSD ... but the simple fact is most consumers are now streaming at 100th of the bit-rate of the studio masters over their iPhones, and if they even have standalone speakers, they are often  'effectively' mono docking stations, or USB sticks attached to a computer. 

Perhaps for the first time in audio history, technology is causing sound quality to decline, not improve. Sadly, I don't think things will change much in 50 years. 

Who needs dynamic range when commercial music rarely exceeds 12 dBs and getting more and more compressed?