CD: What Will Be it's Successor?

[gvortex7]

I can think of a few things. As far as another disc format is concerned, I think a smaller, more densely packed disc that's read by a different type of laser definitely could be coming out sometime in the future, perhaps providing an even higher fidelity of music with portability in mind of course. And I'm not talking about another MiniDisc, but something entirely different.

I believe that MP3's will be out of style in a few years, due to the fact that it's a lossy compression format. I myself started to encode my CDs as wave files because of the better overall sound quality, but am aware of the fact that they take up so much more space. That's why I'm happy with the fact that much larger capacity HDD based MP3 player are coming to the market now that are also able to play wave files. Soon, solid state drives (flash) will be the media storage of choice when really high capacities within that format are finally achieved.

And perhaps in a few years we'll also see a new compression format become widespread that's superior to MP3, and yet able to provide lossless audio in a minimal amount of space. I sure hope it's forthcoming.