From High School to the present day, I've always had an open reel analog tape machine. We rejoiced in being able to spend hours sitting in front of a couple of speakers listening to the latest releases from Led Zepplin, Sir Georg Solti or The Beatles. We enjoyed the sound of the music as much as the music itself.

Then came digital audio. It wasn't popular and didn't even sound that great in 1982 when the CD-Audio format was launched. But eventually compact discs came to rule the world… and not just because they were convenient. As ADCs and DACs improved AND production techniques adapted to the new digital production techniques, the fidelity of CDs eclipsed vinyl LPs and even analog tape. I know it's hard to accept for many audiophiles but the fact remains that 44.1 kHz and 16-bit PCM encoded digital audio is very hard to beat. And the only format that can produce a more accurate reproduction of the microphone feed is high-resolution audio.

Notice that I'm talking about sonic accuracy. I understand the many things they we enjoy are not "faithful" reproductions of the original events. Movies are prime examples. Life doesn't look like the images that we see projected at our local theaters. So there's no harm in preferring vinyl LPs or analog tape over high-resolution audio files. You're free to enjoy whatever format turns you on.

But music fidelity moved back a major step when the internet and personal computers got into the picture. When the first digital copy of a CD was "ripped" from a CD-ROM drive onto the buss of a PC, the music industry was transformed… although they didn't know it. I'm not sure they completely realise to this day.

Heavily compressed MP3 files and other "psychoacoustically" encoded files reversed the steady march of improving audio quality. For the first time, mainstream music consumers were given a choice. You could continue to enjoy great fidelity if you stayed home and paid for your music OR you could enjoy crap sound quality music on the go for free. Guess which trend won?

Unfortunately, we're still largely stuck in the age of "lossy compress audio". There are efforts to get things back on track. Bandwidth, hardware and some content is available that moves us past the era of the MP3 file. This is the promise of high-resolution audio. But it's only a promise.

The potential of new production techniques, better equipment and improved delivery formats will only advance the cause of fidelity if the artists, producers and labels believe they can make more profit by moving into this space. And the only thing that will push them in that direction is us…the people that appreciate great sound and are willing to pay for it.

The time is now. Let's let them know.