Stereo equipment - has it been getting better, and is it going to get better?

In threads about digital music collections, I often see people say that you shouldn't rip music to MP3 (as opposed to, say, FLAC) because while high-bitrate MP3s may sound OK on your current system, they may not do on future better stereos. I'm wondering if this is likely to be true. Have there been many advances in stereo reproduction in the last 10 years? 20? 50? Or big decreases in price? The only thing that I've noticed in my lifetime (and admittedly I only have a peripheral interest in these things) is the existence of T-amps (which presumably haven't improved sound) and things like SACD, which are less to do with reproduction than a completely new format (so independent of FLAC/MP3 arguments), and seem to have been a commercial failure in any case.

Have there been big improvements that I've missed?

as iPods and shitty laptop sound cards become more prevalent, sound technology with decent market penetration has actually been getting shittier!

rereading your question - in technological terms, I think the biggest headway has been made with headphone technology. but in terms of sound data, I think CDs were sort of the peak - SACD and DVD-Audio sort of show that just because you can encode massive amounts of audio data doesn't mean you'll get massively better sound.

SACD and DVD-Audio sort of show that just because you can encode massive amounts of audio data doesn't mean you'll get massively better sound.

True dat. 24-bit is an improvement on 16-bit, but whoever decided to go from 44.1 to 96 kHz just didn't understand their Nyquist. Or didn't care.

a lot of audiophile companies have really made an effort to make nice entry level stuff, i think now you can get the best stuff ever for a relatively affordable price point.

Even 24-bit is a bit overkill as a delivery format (plenty of reasons to use it in the studio), when you can get effective 20-bit+ resolution on CD with noise-shaped dither and the like. But, yes, the high-performance DAC chipsets that were once the preserve of the exotic high-end in the early-mid '90s are pretty commonplace in mid-fi CD players now. Amplifiers are basically a solved thing from an engineering POV, unless you've got very weird speaker loads. Speakers - I dunno. There was a lot of excitement about flat-panel hybrids and the like 10 years ago but we've still got paper cones and coils inside rectangular boxes as far as I can make out, so perhaps we're a bit stuck there.

I s'pose the big change was supposed to be multi-channel ("doing to stereo what stereo did to mono" was the mantra of the believers) but I've still never to this day heard an album in 5.1 so I've no idea whether that lived up to the hype.

The vinyl/vacuum tube thing is a whole other world of euphonic distortion and subjective "musicality" and I don't want to get into that particularly (veteran of Usenet audiophile forums, I'm afraid...)

i think getting rid of the needle and eliminating needle noise was a big jump. you'r enot listening to defects in the vinyl or dust anymore.

> paper cones

or plastic, or kevlar (B&W)

Here's an example from the low end of the market. A few months ago I replaced my home theater sound system, not expecting very much in terms of its performance for listening to music. I was surprised that it came with a microphone for auto-calibration. It's in an odd-shaped room and the speaker locations are a little weird, but after running this, I was really pleased with what I was hearing. I spent less than $300 on the receiver and speakers. Compared to the system I was replacing -- same price range, 10-12 years older -- this felt like a significant technological improvement.

"when you can get effective 20-bit+ resolution on CD with noise-shaped dither and the like"
How does this work? Does it break the CD spec somehow?

No, it's still 16-bit data but dithered down from a 24-bit master in such a way that the quantisation noise is unevenly distributed through the frequency range; with noise-shaping you can effectively achieve a dynamic range of greater than 110dB in the areas where the ear is most sensitive, say 1-4kHz (swings and roundabouts, of course - your noisefloor is way up in the 15-22kHz range but that's hardly going to be audible). This sort of processing has been around for about a decade and a half, maybe more; I can do it on my consumer-level late-'90s HDD recorder and all the multi-track/mastering software packages have noise-shaping plugins (I guess, I'm out of touch with this stuff too). Very clever, a little bit counterintuitive and a good argument against bothering with DVD-Audio at least (SACD is a different thing...and I have a four-year-old child on my lap, so perhaps we'll save that for another day).