Interesting article. I am not a TV watcher, I don't even have cable. However, my wife has a Netflix subscription, and she watches a lot of the critically-acclaimed shows they put out nowadays. From the little I've seen of them, I must agree that, reality crap aside, the TV dramas of the post Sopranos/Wire era are far better than the crap I watched in the 80's.
It is refreshing to see a mainstream media source address the issue of the decline in quality of today's audio equipment. "Music is the only branch of the entertainment world to embrace progressively inferior technologies." I couldn't have said it better myself. A couple of weeks ago, I was standing in line at an estate sale, talking with a guy old enough to be my dad, and another guy old enough to be my gramps (I'm 40). The older guy was talking about how he recently sold thousands of dollars worth of old tube gear to a collector in China. The other guy made a joke about how the far East is sending us all of this cheap digital crap, while they are buying up all of the great tube gear that was all over the US in it's heyday. I, being an ass, suggested we go back to shoving opium down their throats to remedy the trade imbalance, like in the old days.
The interesting thing about the conversation is that all three of us are audio nuts, and nobody even suggested that the new stuff is superior or even equivalent in sound quality. I know this is just one conversation, but every conversation I have with a live audiophile contains the assumption that tube is better than SS, 50's to early 70's gear is better than modern, etc. Of course there are exceptions, but really the only time I hear audiophiles claim that digital (of all things) is superior to most older gear is here on AK.
