Dwapara Yuga - quality in music

In the past, popular entertainment was only available at the theater or music hall, unless one happened to have a castle and sponsored artists.

Since the beginning of Dwapara Yuga in 1900, the accessibility and quality of recorded music has steadily increased from wax cylinders to gramophone to LPs to CDs.

Oddly, the last 10 years has seen the rise and rise of even more accessible devices such as the iPod and iPhone but the fall in quality of the reproduction has been little reported. The recent book Appetite for self-destruction admits that the average fan cares less about quality and the driver for MP3 was the single song format in an era where 7" singles were no longer sold and albums deliberately have only one or two good tracks.

A modern CD is sampled at 1141 kbps (the bigger the figure, the better the quality) but the majority of iTunes music is at 128 or at best 192 kbps which means that much of the quality has been sacrificed in order to have fast downloads and store large numbers of songs.

This means that a whole generation are being deprived of the nuance and range of performance, apart from those attending live concerts or a small niche of audiophiles retaining 2-channel hifi setups that were common from the 70s to the 90s. Even at live concerts, the sound reproduction can leave much to be desired depending on the equipment used.

In the same period, video reproduction is going from strength to strength from the terrible NTSC (in the US) broadcast quality to full HD - high definition. Does this imply that we're becoming more and more of a visual and less of an audio culture?