Vote

SACD

Who wants to listen to anything less than CD quality?

It would be hard to have download of DVD-A or SACD level, for both technical (highly compressed, NO NO)and copy-right reasons (the record company will be too afraid to give out such high quality format).

With wideband connection now available, file size is not important.

i'm more interested in streaming audio. From there, I can identify what music i wish to purchase on CD.

At the moment I am downloading lots of songs that I haven't heard in years. I have a fairly substantial CD collection, but since I started downloading music I haven't bought one CD. Sure, the quality isn't perfect, but it isn't bad either. What really appeals to me is that I can sit in front of my computer and think of a song I haven't heard for years, then about 15 minutes later I am listening to it. As for the sound being the same as AM radio, all I can say is that I have never heard an AM radio that sounded that good. As for my 13-year-old son, he is never going to buy any CDs once he can get music from the Internet! To rephrase Dire Straits' hit song: I want my MP3!

That's between me and my proctologist, buddy!

The real problem is the transfer speed. I would think that when broadband access becomes more widespread, the need for MP3 will disappear.

This is exactly what the mass recording industry deserves for forcing us to suffer with their (sub-standard) recordings for so long.

At present I don't care about downloading music

Such levels of quality are really limited by the compression schemes and the D/A converters on the PC soundcard. I don't think that people will want to wait 10+ hour for a 400MB audio file to download. Nor will a PC soundcard manufacturer be able to market +$3500 cards that could handle it. I have a good soundcard and PC speaker system already, and, not too surprising, it sounds pretty good, but not as good as my mid-fi Denon components and Polk LS90 speakers. I don't think any sound cardmanufacter will make a PC card to match the DACs in a Wadia or Linn player. You may be able to sell a $3500 CD player easily enough, but a $3500 soundcard that could go obsolete in three months? I don't know if the general public would accept that.

I refuse to pay for anything lower in quality than the original CD.

MP3 is marginally adequate for the car, but in the few instances I've tried it on my junior or senior home systems, the results have been horrendous. (Then again, I can't speak to the quality of the transfer vs. the potential of MP3.)

But at very lower price!

I listen to samples on the Internet for content, not quality. If I want the music, I buy the CD. I have no interest in burning my own CDs from downloads, whether free or not.

I've been using and am impressed with the quality of MiniDisc. I would be satisfied with MD quality for much of what I want.

I read on E-Town that there already is a successor to MP3 that is better than CD (96/24 or better) and six channels, and smaller size than MP3. If this is as good as it sounds, then downloads will be a joy. If we have machines (portable and rack) to play the files on CDR.

High-end audio wants the best! No matter how good downloads get, they will NEVER be the best. The engineers of other formats will do whatever it takes to stay ahead.

I don't see how downloads can ever rival CD for quality. As a serious audiophile, recording quality is paramount to me. Also, packaging plays an important part in the whole experience. Downloads take all the fun out of browsing in a music store.

Everyone knocks MP3s. But I find that MP3 encoded at more than 224Kbps sounds as good as uncompressed. So I'm happy w/MPEG1 Layer 3 audio encoding. You just have to pick a good rate.

I wouldn't be interested until it at least equaled the performance of a very-high-quality CD, something akin to the Philips 4D recordings. 20- bit mastering at a minimum.

It has to be better than analogue

The CONTENT will have to be worthwhile, too

For one thing, the sound quality is already much better then AM radio, and FM as well. (Or at least as good as a strong FM signal.) Although I would like any downloadable music I pay for to be at least CD quality, there is also the issue of price. I will never pay the same price for a downloaded single as I would for the same song on a physical CD, yet most record labels seem to think that people are willing to do this. While they can get away with charging $3.99

But I think that downloadable audio will never be at CD level and higher because multimedia acoustics and soundcards will never reach high-end level.

Of course SACD quality would be nice, but let's face it there is already so much disparity between recordings thatalready having a good CD quality would be fine.

When they stop holding back the good stuff, I'll stop holding back the cash.

Better IS better!

If I'm going to pay for it, I want hard copy in my hands. It better be cheap or free if I have to spend my time looking for it, downloading it, and burning my own media. The only exception would be if the record companies used downloads to distribute specialized or out-of-print titles for which it would not be economically feasible for them to manufacture and print discs. Quality should be 16-bit CD quality minimum, otherwise why bother?

Why would anyone who has heard SACD settle for anything less?