Audio Quality - How Much is Necessary?

How much do you worry about audio quality?  Do you ever have high-enough quality?  Does anybody care about audio quality? What is audio quality?

I'm very happy to announce a special Hearing Seminar on audio quality. Join us for a panel of distinguished audio experts who will talk about how they perceive audio, when is the quality high enough, and how do we define quality. Come be part of the discussion.

I think it would be fun to have a panel about audio quality at the Hearing Seminar. Might you be interested too?

My interest in this is based on a few observations:

• Unlike my college days, most people don’t care about amplifiers or speakers or needles.
• Most people seem happy with their MP3s/AAC/… and earbuds.
• We heard a talk about sound diffracting down hallways, and around corners. Cool science, but does it matter?

Our distinguised panelists include 

• Marina Bosi - Audio compression guru and consultant
• Poppy Crum - Chair of ITU Audio Quality panel and OTC hearing aid quality standard
• Dan Levitin - Music producer, artist and author
• Gautham Mysore - Head of Adobe audio group
• Jan Skogland - Head of web audio compression group at Google

How do you think about audio quality?  When is the quality high enough?  We'll aim for a high-quality discussion.