Why Are We Stuck With Poor Old Washed-Up CD’s?

“To the new generation of music artists and engineers, ‘CD-quality sound’ is an ironic joke. In recording studios, today’s musicians produce their works digitally at resolutions far beyond the grainy old CD standard. To make the sounds listenable on antiquarian CD players, the final mix is retrofitted to compact disc specs by stripping it of billions of bits’ worth of musical detail and dynamics. It’s like filming a movie in IMAX and then broadcasting it only to black-and-white TV sets. It doesn’t have to be this way.”