By the way, I ain't no communist and I do love America
Sadly, this does not reflect well on our culture in general. We have sophisticated technologies and people with the skills to apply them. High fidelity sound could easily be the baseline and it would not even cost more money. However, music is treated as product/comodity rather than art, at every level. One could argue that American Idol performers and all that stuff on corporate controlled radio should be compressed and streamed into the torrent of useless information that fills cyberspace (with the exception of this thread, of course :) ). I am all for free markets (if they are truly free), but taken to its logical conclusion, greed predominates. Fundamental things like art and health care are crushed under the weight of market forces that seek only bottom line objectives. Materialism can leave you pretty well impovershed!
I remember Tom Waits once saying in an interview that he liked listening to music through a store front PA speaker. I think I might prefer that over a high end audio system playing compressed files.
Thanks for the tip on the Micheal Breker SACD - that sounds like a must have.