One really, really critical piece of this: our ability to discern quality is predominated by how much quality we've had the opportunity to discern in our lifeti

One really, really critical piece of this: our ability to discern quality is predominated by how much quality we've had the opportunity to discern in our lifetimes. Jeff has eaten at ten thousand restaurants around the world in his lifetime. Nick drinks Soylent for 80% of his calories; the other 20% often comes from McDonalds or Chipotle. They've both eaten at this Bistro you are considering getting dinner at; after asking for their opinion, would you assign more weight to Jeff's or Nick's? Its true that 99% of the population cannot discern the difference between lossless and ~320kbps lossy audio encoding. Is that truly a "natural" phenomena? Or is it learned through existence in an inevitable world where high quality music and high-quality listening devices aren't available to most people? What impacts does this have as that drop in quality feeds upstream: when producers and musicians make music with Airpods because that's what they grew up with, and its what most of their audience uses? Music is a less interesting domain of this discussion because, really, most platforms do lossless now. Spotify is adding it soon. Its basically the default on Apple Music and Tidal. AM has genuine multi-channel Dolby Atmos. Extremely high quality music consumption has never been easier or more accessible (well, a 3.5mm jack would be nice, but that's a sailed ship). IMO: Video is a far, far more tragic loss. Netflix charges more for access to 4K content; but you'd be a fool to pay it, because as many who have streamed both would attest, "4K isn't worth it you can barely tell the difference between 1080p". If you played these same people a Bluray of that release, their minds would be blown. Near-100% of people can discern the difference, and would prefer the Bluray; but Netflix will not stream that quality, because its an order of magnitude more bandwidth usage. What's more: Many recent productions are simply never available in this highest-quality format. Because 99% of content is consumed via Compressed Stream: TV panel quality at the same price point has stagnated or even dropped over the past five years. I hope you'll believe that some major productions may soon have a conversation like "Why do we need these five figure dollar 16k cameras, this is just going to stream on netflix, just grab a basic Sony DSLR from B&H and let's save some money." Welcome to Enshitification.