Digital audio formats and obsolesence

The "micro-looking md" is DataPlay optical disc w/ 500mb of of memory.

The first post says it well. The only other point would be if you have X amount of dollars then something will suffer if you have to buy five speakers and amplifiers instead of two for the same price. If the previous scenario is real then that's why HT won't sound as good as 2ch. A little off the topic, personnaly, the digital thing is just one big mess, there's DAT, CD (CD-R/W), CD-V, LD, HDCD, DVD (DVD-R/W), DVD-A, DVR-Blue, MD (a super MD of sorts), some micro-md looking thing, SACD, a 5.1 SACD, MP3 (and every level of compression), memory stick, TiVO (the digital TV thing) and even a few DCC decks floating around. In the end its probably all going to be on hard drives, in which case the question is how long and how long the industry will resist it? And if its on a silver disc, whatever spins it will be able to spin all the ones of the past too without a problem. Chips are chips so it shouldn't be hard for the formats to coexist with high-qualty once something settles. We've already witnessed it with the DTS/DD. Thankfully, speakers are speakers and amps are amps so the only changes are in processors and how many channels that preamp can handle (and hopefully there is some realistic limit to just how many channels we get). So the CD won't go obselete, unless it is on hard drives.

If you are running a MSB DAC to an amplifier I would hope it sounds as good as an audio front end, because it is an audio front end in my book. When people say an HT front end is not as good for music they are referring to playing music through a HT receiver or using the AC-3 or DTS converter to play music as well as movies if using separates.