I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the advantages of the Internet, digital file-sharing and recording. Thanks to advances in technology, we can acquire great-sounding music faster than ever. But new technologies are never free from dangers and pitfalls.

The inventions of cars and planes have allowed us to get places faster than ever while contributing massively to global warming. The internet has allowed us greater access to information than ever while putting newspapers and magazines out of business and making journalism a less lucrative profession. Likewise, the internet and digital music have created their own sets of problems. Artists have increasingly less control over the distribution of their music. Music sales have been on the decline. And so far, the attempts to counteract these trends have just contributed to consumer alienation and frustration. But at the moment, I’m not concerned about any of that. What frightens me about the internet and digital music is how it is destroying sound quality.

Thanks to the internet and digital compression, the MP3 is the most popular music format while the vastly better-sounding CDs appear to be dying, and by all rights should be dead already. MP3s by design, do not sound as good as the WAV files contained on CDs. In order to compress the sound files, MP3s eliminate bits of information contained in the sound file. These are supposedly the parts that you can’t hear. But you can. Or at least I can, and I know my hearing is nothing exceptional. Especially after more than a decade standing in the front row of every concert. While an MP3 certainly retains more information than their 1/10 compression size would suggest, important pieces of information are nonetheless gone once a file is compressed to MP3. It’s not always immediately noticeable, but once you compare an MP3 against the original WAV file, the differences are stark. Every time I have listened to a CD burned from MP3s before purchasing the original album, I have found myself wowed by the difference. Sometimes I find myself even dismissing an album until I hear the real thing.

Lately, however, I feel like I’m screaming into the wind whenever I talk about this. Respected publications confidently assert that there’s no discernable difference between medium-quality MP3s and CDs. Even my girlfriend isn’t on my side. I have a few audiophile friends, but most people I know listen to MP3s blithely. What baffles me is that many of these same people buy high definition televisions. The importance of picture quality appears universal, but sound quality is important to only a minority of the population. To me, the analogy between the two is identical. You may see all the same things on a regular television, but in high definition, everything is sharper, clearer and more fun to watch. The same is true for the difference between MP3s and lossless music files. Sure, you can still hear the same notes, words and instruments from a MP3 file, but nothing sounds as sharp. It’s just not as fun to listen to. Played back to back, the differences between MP3s and lossless files are clear as day.

Well not really. On my stereo, the difference is definitely clear. But I have a good receiver and some pretty nice speakers. They are definitely on the low end of the high fidelity market, but are still a vast improvement over what I see most of my friends using. Many of them don’t have any stereo system to speak of and use computer speakers that connect directly to their computers. And here in New York the iPod/iPhone is ubiquitous. On cheap audio equipment, the differences between lossless and lossy music files begin to evaporate.

And why would anyone have anything other than the crappiest audio equipment? Major electronic stores rarely sell anything good, and they do their best to keep you from ever getting a chance to hear their equipment. High end audio stores can be outwardly hostile towards customers who want to spend less than $1000 on a home stereo. The lack of middle ground is frustrating. To some, there are just those who listen to MP3s on their iPods and computers and others who can afford to spend $10,000 on a home stereo. People like me with modest budgets but a desire to hear the music they purchase are left out in the cold.

But increasingly, I’m finding my market isolation shared by the rich high audio enthusiasts. Because no amount of money is enough to buy legal lossless downloads of most artists. The biggest online music sellers –iTunes and Amazon—don’t sell them. Sure, you can still buy CDs, but to those of us who are growing tired of unnecessary physical copies of their music, the situation is somewhat infuriating. And some increasingly releases –most notably Belle and Sebastian’s live performance of If You’re Feeling Sinister— are only available in MP3 via iTunes. Many albums today also have bonus tracks that are only available via iTunes. This leaves fans with no way of acquiring lossless versions of releases. To me, it is the ultimate insult to music fans.

The irony of this situation is of course that advances in technology should improve sound quality. While they’re readily apparent, I can’t quantify the advances in the technologies for listening to and recording music. But the advances in internet downloading speeds and hard drive capacity are readily quantifiable. For $150, I can buy a 1.5 terabyte hard drive that would not have even been on the market years ago. This is more than enough space to store in excess of 1500 albums and concerts all in various lossless formats. Internet speeds are also vastly improved. I can download FLAC files of an entire album in less time than it took to download a single song over Napster. The reasons against storing and distributing lossless files are evaporating as the costs decline dramatically. But the MP3 doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.