Boing Boing’s Richard Metzger has a column up about those surround sound copies of albums available at record stores (you know, the $24 version of an album that you can get a normal copy of for $8.99), and how they’re likely to go the way of the Dodo.

First off, it's bugged me for years --since the Napster days-- that the public is willing to put up with crappy sounding MP3 files! I simply do not get it!...

 

There's been a little-noticed effort on the part of the music industry to cater to audiophiles in recent years: SACD, DVD-A, and 5:1 surround remixes go quite some distance in stepping it up for those of us who like to kick back, relax and actually LISTEN to our music...

 

Before you know it, these shiny audiophile playthings will be impossible to come by, or at least prohibitively expensive. The day of the CD and DVD is almost over and so it seems unlikely that the music industry will continue to pour money down this particularly niche black hole...

 

It's a shame the extreme audiophile formats never really took off.

 

As most dinosaurs lamenting the fact that MP3’s sound crappy, Metzger is shocked that people don’t want to hear Roxy Music’s Avalon in surround sound, and would rather listen to it as an MP3 on a computer speaker. Sure, those audiophile recordings are pretty sweet (they’re like the Rolls Royce of CDs), but the fact of the matter is that MP3s and music on computers are way more convenient than a CD on a stereo, and to say that people who listen to MP3s don’t like to just listen to music is kind of misguided.

Most music listeners have made the decision to take convenience over quality, and while that may seem like a bad thing to older audiophiles, it underscores how easily music is accessed now. It’d be nice if the music business could keep everyone happy, but it’s unlikely that can keep anyone happy at this point. [Boing Boing]