EAR OF THE BEHOLDER
In response to my Times column, a friend who's both an economist and a serious audiophile writes:
Bingo! Do I love your piece today! This is the great debate in hi fi. Do we want engineering dweebs to tell us what they think is accurate and what they can measure is the only relevant yardstick for judging sound quality? Or do we let consumers say what they like or don't like without getting hung up over whether it's imaginary or mislabeled or irrelevant? Or even possibly something genuinely important that they can't measure yet?
When the CD first came out engineers insisted that it was identical to the real thing. In particular, CDs of old analog recordings were said to have captured everything on those recordings. Audiophiles vehemently disagreed.
Fast forward 20 years: Not only do we now have a superior standard for those who care to pay for SACD high def cds, but it turns out that even those supposedly crappy analog recordings sound even better through the new medium. This despite the fact that old recordings were supposedly so limited in dynamic range that CDs were just "wasting bits".
At the same time, those who don't much care about subtle distinctions have their MP3s and other such compressed music over the net.
Everyone is happy.****