In my lifetime music has evolved many times, but it has still not reached its final end point.  But the end is in sight. One of the key barriers, DRM, is being removed by most music providers. The second is the available disk space or memory on players and computers.

It started with vinyl (singles and LPs).  In fact I'm writing this blog look at a pile of albums in a friends office.  Old tatty covers and scratched vinyl inside.  They were at their best only once - the first time they were played.

CDs came along and a dramatic increase in quality, for all but the most avid of audiphiles who owned £10,000 record players. This killed off the LP for good.

But the portability was not solved until the MP3 player came along. These players allowed the tracks on a CD to be compressed and put on a player.  But at a huge cost of quality. Plus Apple made it easy - but you still had to listen through crappy little white headphones.

And now you can download the same low qualit music from different webistes, iTunes included.

So what is the final piece in the story?  Playing lossless files (10x bigger than MP3), on an iPod is now possible as the hard disks are bigger.  You can even get the internal components of an iPod replaced by 'proper' audiophile components (www.redwineaudio.com) Add a some top end headphones (Sennheiser, Bose, Shure, Ultimate Ears) and you are good to go.

The only downside.  There are only a few websites that allow you to buy and download lossless files.  MusicGiant.com in the USA is one.  so currently you buy the CD and rip it and then copy to your iPod.