I thought that some of you might be interested in an article that appears in today's Boston Globe business section, carrying the quoted title of this thread. It takes a look at the differences in sound quality between vacuum tubes and solid state and between vinyl and CDs/MP3s in audio and between CRTs and fixed-pixel displays in video. The author, Hiawatha Bray (honest), gives the new technologies their due so far as convenience and reliabilty are concerned but elicits comments from the owner of a high-end audio store, from Paul Semenza of iSuppli Corp., and from Shawn Britton of Mobile Fidelity as evidence that picture and sound quality has not kept pace with technology's more practical advances. SACD is noted as the rare digital format that actually comes close to what vinyl systems can accomplish.

The article is much better than most of the discussions about such topics that I've seen in the mainstream press, especially those with a business slant, which tend to get the technical and enthusiast's viewpoints all wrong. Publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are particularly bad at portraying the whys and wherefores of HDTV. Bray's take, however, is lucid and balanced. One point in the article that rang true was that regardless of CRT's unmatched ability to render chroma and lumina, fixed pixels at the top of their game have a sharpness and crispness that can become attractive, and addictive, in their own right--something that I've noticed myself, having given up my last CRT, which replaced a plasma, in favor of another microdisplay for that very reason.

Ed