There used to be a group of people who cared about bitrate. They wanted 64kbps Audio that sounded better then MP3 128Kbps, which till today still isn&#x27;t possible. Be it AAC, HE-AAC, Vobris, or the new Opus. Despite the hype every time a new codec arrived.<p>There used to be a group of people who wanted codec that is the same quality as Lossless at 256Kbps to 320Kbps. Personally I think MPC ( Musepack ) accomplished it. And it is patentless as well since it is based on MP2. But the codec never caught on in Hardware world. Meanwhile AAC does about just as well @256kbps despite being more complex.<p>That was in the Naspter -&gt; iTunes download era, Then time flies, both group of people lost interest. Mainly for the same reason. Both group wanted to store as many music downloads as possible. 1st group dont mind a little quality loss, 2nd group wanted near perfect quality @256Kbps, however HDD prices dropped to a point where 1st group dont mind storing them in ~256kbps and 2nd group will simply store them as lossless FLAC.<p>Then we come to the age of Streaming, that doesn&#x27;t necessarily means only Apple Music or Spotify and the like, the largest music streaming is properly Youtube. People dont download anymore, They just click and play on Youtube.<p>It tuns out, I think we have reached the stage of &quot;good enough&quot;. Whether it is audio, or video. With Video, we can get huge improvement if we smooth out the noise &#x2F; grain details.  
Our broadband speeds continues to improve, we will have G.Fast &amp; VDSL2, the next generation of DSL broadband tech. Most kids or youngster of this generation dont care about Audio &#x2F; Video quality as much, they would rather want instant and ease of access.