26 years ago yesterday, the very first Compact Disc was introduced to Germany by Sony and Phillips Consumer Electronics. That 26 years seems to translate more to the life span of a dog than a human being, as the CD is already dying a slow, painful, messy death that has left the music industry in shambles and has music fans dancing on the CD's impending grave.

When it first came out, the compact disc was appealing mainly for being the only method of obtaining digital audio, as well as its cheapness to produce relative to vinyl. Today, however, when you don't even need a physical copy of music to enjoy it, mass producing albums with Jewel cases and jackets seems exceedingly wasteful, both ecologically and economically.

But Scott Thill at Wired's Listening Post blog makes an interesting observation that runs smack in the face of those who claim that the main advantage to older music formats is sound quality: with all the hi-res technologies available to digital media, HD audio may actually surpass the sound quality of vinyl in the future. If the technology ever gets to that point, than we would have no need to buy an album at a store ever again, and maybe, just maybe, produce a world we'd want our children to live in.